Tag Archives: Terry Pratchett

Pixel Scroll 4/1/25 Scroll, Scroll, Scroll, Till Her Daddy Takes Her Pixel Away!

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(1) THE VERSIFICATORE. Bruce Sterling offers the creation of a working Star Trek-style communicator as one example of “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future (2025)” in the Medium transcript of an extemporaneous speech he gave at SXSW 2025 on March 12. Then he goes into full detail about a comparable project he’s involved with in Italy. (Let me emphasize this is not an April Fools post.)

Fifteen years ago, here at South By Southwest, I was on a panel where the term “design fiction” was made public. Before Julian Bleecker invented and deployed that term, there were many things going on that resembled “design fiction.” But nobody knew “how to do design fiction.” The ideas and approaches were diffuse, they weren’t crystallised.

This current speech is taking place in another decade, in a era where “design fiction” has been normalized, and it’s practiced widely. “Design Fiction” is established, and is part of the worlds of design and futurism. This speech, “How to Rebuild an Imaginary Future,” is also about futurism, design, and design-fiction “diegetic prototypes.”…

…I am the art director of a technology art festival in Turin, Italy, which is called “Share Festival.” In our researches, we found a historical design-fiction that we want and need to rebuild for artistic and cultural reasons. And we are rebuilding it. It’s an artifact, an imaginary machine, from a science fiction story written 65 years ago by a science fiction writer in Turin: Primo Levi.

Primo Levi’s imaginary “Versificatore” is as old as a Star Trek Communicator. It is a cybernetic, desktop, mass-manufactured business machine that can write Italian poetry. The Versificatore works with prompts, very much like ChatGPT. So, Primo Levi’s historic “Versificatore” is a prophetic vision of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence.

The Versificatore first appeared, in May 1960, as a character in a short drama piece that Levi published in a newspaper. Years later, that story was gathered into a collection of other futuristic gadget stories that Primo Levi also wrote, as part of a series of Levi’s science fiction satires and comedies.

In 1971, the Versificatore became one episode of Italian TV series derived from the Levi stories.

In these screenshots from the TV show, we can see an Italian poet, and a technology salesman, and a secretary interacting with their brand-new desktop poetry machine. The machine is a creative writer and is the center of the action in the drama. The humans react to this intelligent machine with varying attitudes of enthusiasm, amazement, commercial interest, dread, alarm and so on.

It’s quite amazing how well Levi understood the future human reactions to a novelty like an AI that can write human language. You can watch that show on YouTube right now, it’s quite engaging and funny. Of course it’s all in Italian, but who cares? As you watch the show, you can get Google’s Artificial Intelligence to translate the TV show from speech to subtitled text in real-time. It turns out, sixty year later, that Primo Levi was quite right about the prospect of machines with an astonishing command of human language. They’re very much here, and wreaking predictable havoc.

So, at Share Festival, thanks to a good friend, Riccardo Luna from “Wired Italia,” we became aware of Levi’s diegetic prophesy of modern AI. Since Primo Levi was from Turin, and we’re a festival from Turin, we immediately decided that we had to rebuild a Levi Versificatore and show that device to our public. We understand that the Versificatore has historic, artistic, cinematic, computational and literary significance. It should be a public source of civic pride.

In other words, we are motivated to rebuild an imaginary future. This is not a merely hypothetical project. It’s an actual artistic production project, and even a patriotic crusade. It’s a practical matter for us, where we have to raise funds, and find designers and crafts people, and find a venue for the display of our new artifact, and so on….

…Let’s admit it: it’s a rather unusual thing to re-make an imaginary Italian Artificial Intelligence from the 1960s that works in public and speaks Italian poetry. But in this speech, I want to put that work into a larger context. It’s just one practical sample of a broader creative practice, which might be described as: deliberately turning culturally significant imaginary things into functional real-life things.

We are using modern capabilities to make things work, when it was once merely imagined that these things might somehow someday work.

This Versificatore project is a physical demonstration of the impressive prescience of a world-famous Turinese writer. Primo Levi made up some other different gadgets in his stories, but with this one, he hit the predictive jackpot.

We have means, motive and opportunity to rebuild this important object, for our public, which is the Turinese public, and for our client, who is MUFANT, the science fiction and fantasy museum in Turin. Turin has a museum of “fantascienza,” so naturally they’re interested in Turinese science fiction museum exhibits. Like this one.

So, with that given, what is the proper way to do this? We are confident that we can build a replica, but what are the best practices here? Who else is doing anything like this? Where can we get some help and good advice? How do we know if we’ve done a good job? What are we trying to prove with this project?…

(2) CHINA MIÉVILLE Q&A. [Item by Tom Becker.] Capitalist billionaires are changing the world’s political and economic systems to serve their visions of the future that are straight out of science fiction. China Miéville, who knows politics and science fiction very well, punctures that balloon in an interview with TechCrunch: “China Miéville says we shouldn’t blame science fiction for its bad readers”.

Even though some science-fiction writers do think in terms of their writing being either a utopian blueprint or a dystopian warning, I don’t think that’s what science fiction ever is. It’s always about now. It’s always a reflection. It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context. It’s always an expression of the anxieties of the now. So there’s a category error in treating it as if it is “about the future.”

The full interview is well worth reading, because Miéville is always interesting, and he has much to say about the fantasy traditions that inspired him, and the science fiction that he loves, and the value of literature that is diverse and contradictory and not a simplistic blueprint.

(3) IS PRATCHETT MORE BASED THAN TOLKIEN? “Discworld Rules” claims Venkatesh Rao at Contraptions.

The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.

As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

This is no way for a high-agency technological species to live, and thankfully it doesn’t have to be.

I mean, I get why politicians and economists might identify with the story. They enjoy little to no direct technological agency, harbor ridiculous Chosen One conceits, and operate in domains — political narratives and the dismal pseudoscience of economics — that are natural intellectual monopolies or oligopolies. Domains that allow fantasies to be memed into existence (the technical term is hyperstitional theory-fictions) for a while before they come crashing down to earth in flames, demonstrating yet again that no, you do not in fact get to create your own reality; that “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”

There is a contrarian reading of The Lord of the Rings that argues that Sauron and Mordor are in fact the good guys, and represent technological progress, etc. But this is throwing good money narrativium after bad. Flipping the valence of a Chosen One story doesn’t make it any better. It’s still a Chosen One story with reversed roles.

No, you have to tell different sorts of stories altogether.

Such stories have, in fact, been told. They are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories. This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld….

… If you’re an actual, serious technologist, Discworld is where you should look for clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces. It is catnip for actual technological curiosity, as opposed to validation of incuriously instrumental approaches to technology….

(4) FEARLESS MONSTER FANS. Peter Bebergal will deliver a Zoom lecture, “Monster World”, about “How pop culture monsters mythologised our worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other” on April 14. This Last Tuesday Society digital event begins at 8:00 p.m. – British time, apparently. Tickets are £6 – £10 & By Donation. Ticket buys also will be sent a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

Monster Worlds
In the 1970s, the sometimes-garish world of monster-movie pop culture was a comfort, an external expression of grotesquery and strangeness that the culture was feeling inside but had no name for. Rather than making us more afraid, monsters mythologized our own abstract worries about sexuality, nuclear war, race and the other, as well as personifying our collective sense of being untethered from mystery and enchantment. The talk will track the changing face of monsters as mythic and literary creatures as our culture’s own lingering unease began to morph, moving from the shadowed myths of the past into the daytime horrors of serial killers and gore and argue that we need monsters again to learn how to reimagine what frightens us in a way that remythologizes our anxieties and will offer a path for a re-enchanting our imaginations using monsters as a guide, looking at current examples in film, television, and comics.

(5) CRAWFORD AWARD JUDGES SOLICIT SUBMISSIONS FOR 2025. The William L. Crawford Award, given by the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), recognizes an outstanding writer whose first fantasy book was published during the previous calendar year. The judges are currently soliciting books published in 2025 for the award to be given at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in 2026.

Publishers are asked to submit qualifying ebooks in PDF and ePub formats here.

What works qualify

This is an award for an author’s first work of fantasy in book form. It is not a first novel award; an author may have a long bibliography and still qualify for their first work of fantasy. “Book” is defined broadly, and includes novels, novellas, poetry collections, short fiction, graphic novels, works in translation, or other work at the discretion of the judges.

The Award Administrator is Kelly Robson. This year’s judges are Brian Attebery, Joyce Chng, Eddie Clark, Joy Sanchez-Taylor, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay.

Brian Attebery is an American writer and emeritus professor of English and philosophy at Idaho State University. He is known for his studies of fantasy literature, including The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin and Strategies of Fantasy which won the Mythopoeic Award

Joyce Chng lives in Singapore. Their speculative fiction has appeared in The Apex Book of World SF II, We See A Different Frontier, Cranky Ladies of History, and Accessing The Future. Joyce also co-edited THE SEA IS OURS: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia with Jaymee Goh. Their novels span across wolf clans (Starfang: Rise of the Clan), vineyards (Water into Wine) and swordmaking forges (Fire Heart) respectively. Joyce wrangles article editing at Strange Horizons and is diversity coordinator for IGDN (Independent Game Designer Network). 

Eddie Clark is an academic and SFF fan from Wellington, New Zealand. He has been peering into the obscure corners of SFF for thirty years, recently with a particular focus on queer fantasy.

Dr. Joy Sanchez-Taylor is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College whose research interest is science fiction and fantasy literature by authors of color. Her first book Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Writers of Color (2021) examines the contributions of late twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. and Canadian science fiction authors of color to the genre. Her newest book is titled Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre (forthcoming July 2025).

Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies at the University of Oslo. He is the leader of CoFUTURES, an international research group on contemporary futurisms headquartered in Oslo. He is a World Fantasy Award-winning editor, translator, writer, and critic of speculative fiction, and the producer of Kalpavigyan: A Speculative Journey, the first documentary film on Indian science fiction.

(6) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Ruthven Todd’s Space Cat series

The Muppet Show has a segment called “Pigs in Space.” Well, this is the Social Justice Credential counterpart, “Cats in Space”, with a dollop of ever-so-cute kittens added in, which appeared long before Heinlein’s Pixel came into being as they were published between 1952 and 1958. 

This was definitely a departure for the author Ruthven Todd who is known primarily for his poetry, scholarly work on William Blake studies, and as R. T. Campbell for writing mysteries.

It’s a children’s books series involving Flyball, a cat who, yes, lives in space. And like all cats wears a space suit. These are not your ordinary felines by any means. 

The books, which are all illustrated by Paul Galdone, are Space Cat, Space Cat Visits Venus, Space Cat Meets Mars and Space Cat and the Kittens. Without giving anything away, let me just say that there will be a lot of cats, not a few kittens and considerable comical situations as the series goes on. 

If you don’t mind a lot of SPOILERS, James Davis Nicoll has a rather funny look at them over at Reactor.

They are available in both hardcover and from the usual suspects.

(7) COMICS SECTION.

(8) STARLINER DEBRIEFING. Ars Technica spoke to the astronauts and learned “Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought”.

As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner’s thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone’s throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission’s flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

“I don’t know that we can come back to Earth at that point,” Wilmore said in an interview. “I don’t know if we can. And matter of fact, I’m thinking we probably can’t.”

Starliner astronauts meet with the media

On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them….

We cut to where two thrusters have just failed as the Starliner arrives at the ISS.

… Wilmore: “Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That’s a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, ‘What do you think?’ they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.”

From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA’s webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point….

(9) TAKING EXTRA TIME TO SPIN THIS WEB. “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse’ Release Date and First Look” at Variety.

“Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” the third entry in Sony’s animated web-slinging trilogy, will swing into theaters… in a few years. It’ll be released on June 4, 2027.

“We know how important this franchise is to so many people around us. We just could not run it back,” the filmmaking team of producer Phil Lord and co-directors Bob Persichetti and Justin K. Thompson said at CinemaCon, the movie theater trade show that’s currently unfolding in Las Vegas. “So, we decided we needed to take the time to make sure we got it just right.”…

… On stage at CinemaCon, Lord teases that Miles begins the threequel as a fugitive on the run from every other spider in the multiverse… and hinted that “Gwen and his other friends may or may not be enough to help him save the family that’s been the leading part of the entire system.”…

(10) JUSTWATCH TOP 10S. The most-viewed streaming sff movies and TV of March 2025 have been ranked by JustWatch.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Tom Becker, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Peer.]

Pixel Scroll 10/6/24 In Nomine Pixelis, Et Fileii, Et Scrollius Godstalkii

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(1) LEARNING CURVE. “5 Dark Academia Novels from the World of Dark Fantasy” — CrimeRead’s Victory Witherkeigh on sub-genre of the school novel.

…What is it about school-setting stories that make us as readers sink into the world so much faster? Is it our nostalgia for a time when life seemed much more straightforward than our lives as working adults? We’ve seen it across the tales of boy wizards, lightning thieves, and even young women writing love letters. As a dark fantasy/horror author and fan, there’s something about school being a nightmare that just sings to my penchant for the spooky season of fall…

…Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo – What is it about the secret societies of the Ivy League schools that are so interesting? Is it our own hunger for conspiracy theories when dealing with the institutions that have produced several of the United States’ most notorious leaders? Follow Galaxy “Alex” Stern as she navigates her first year at Yale University as the occult apprentice of a missing mentor trying to handle school and the varying power dynamics of the illegal occult use of the secret societies. This is the first book in a two-part Bardugo series that will make you snuggle in your college sweatshirt tighter….

(2) WHY HORROR? Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk tells the Guardian why she chose to write a horror novel:

“I adore horror. But I realised, too, that only the tools of that genre could portray the topic I wanted to portray – the hidden violence, the misogyny that is rife in the entirety of our culture, which we live with like some sort of constant illness, like a predator that is always present and emerges from time to time to attack us.”

(3) FOUNDATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY FANTASY. “Gods who make worlds” in The Christian Century.

Three decades ago, Tad Williams published the final volume in the best epic fantasy trilogy written in English since The Lord of the Rings. Called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the series ran from 1988 to 1993 and totaled over a million words. Half of those words came in the final book—one of the longest books ever to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list….

…Why have these books sold well but never set the world on fire?

Three reasons come to mind. First, while Williams may mark a certain transition away from the never-ending half-lives of J. R. R. Tolkien imitations, his stories do not belong to the grimdark turn of contemporary fantasy (a turn recently pilloried by Sebastian Milbank as “grimdull”). They are not gritty. Whether the topic is sex or violence, there’s nothing pornographic on display. Williams is a romantic at heart. His stories are not sadistic. Subversion, when and where it happens, is subtle, thematic, and stylistic; the narratives are not oedipal, with Tolkien or C. S. Lewis or Christian morals as the fated father. For readers or viewers exhausted by the teetering nihilism of Game of Thrones and its many peers, Williams is a breath of fresh air.

Second, Williams puts the “slow” in “slow burn.” He is a master plotter, and you may be confident that every single narrative thread, no matter how small, will come together by the end. But there’s no hand-holding and no artificial fireworks to keep your attention. I know only two kinds of people who have picked up Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn: those who put it down after about 200 pages, bored to tears and wondering what all the fuss was about, and those who kept going all the way to the end, falling in love in the meantime. There is no third group.

Finally, the world and history and happenings of Osten Ard are colored by a deep melancholy. (One character is startled to find a timeworn but intact statue: “She had never seen an ancient city of her people that was not in ruins.” A different character wonders to himself: “Is all we have—all we are—only a memorial of what we failed to save?”) Williams’s prose is among the best in fantasy, and its distinguishing character is a kind of plangent lyricism. In the dedication of the third volume, he calls the book “a little world of heartbreak and joy.”…

(4) COPYRIGHTUS INFRINGIO! “Warner Bros pulls plug on Harry Potter events at library” reports the Jackson Hole (Wyo.) News and Guide.

After eight years, Teton County Library has been forced to cancel its free Harry Potter-inspired programming for children and adults.

This year’s events — A Night at Hogwarts, Harry Potter Trivia for Adults and Harry Potter Family Day — had all been scheduled for later this month.

The library said in a press release Thursday that it acted in response to a cease-and-desist letter from legal representatives of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., the owner of copyright and other intellectual property rights related to the films featuring child wizard Harry Potter.

Before receiving the letter, the library’s staff “was unaware that this free educational event was a copyright infringement,” the release said. “In the past, libraries had been encouraged to hold Harry Potter-themed events to promote the books as they were released.”…

Boing Boing snarkily says:

…In the past the company has encouraged such activities, but it’s rebooting Harry Potter and wants to make sure the decks are cleared of deauthorized content and all the little brains wiped and ready for their new Vision for the Franchise….

(5) TODAY’S THING TO WORRY ABOUT. Military.com reports “Troops at Colorado Space Force Base Will Have to Bring Their Own To-Go Boxes for Dining Hall”.

… “As of 15 October 2024, the Schriever SFB DFAC will no longer provide takeout containers for patrons,” the spokesman said. “This initiative is part of our ongoing efforts to reduce waste and minimize our environmental impact. Individuals who wish to take their food to go are welcome to bring their own reusable containers.”

Schriever Space Force Base near Colorado Springs is home to numerous around-the-clock missions ranging from GPS operations, missile detection and warning, satellite communications and high-level surveillance missions.

As a result of those daunting and time-consuming missions, many of the 8,000 Guardians, airmen and civilian employees on base are often in a hurry and take their meals or leftovers from the DFAC — fittingly called the Satellite Dish Dining Facility — to go.

The news was not well-received on the Space Force subreddit.

“So, if you’re on crew at Schriever, or are simply one of those people who doesn’t have time for a real lunch break and prefers (like me) to take a meal back to your desk and do working lunches, consider this your heads up to go buy a bunch of food containers,” one commenter wrote.

“I’m always impressed about how the negative-morale field around Schriever is able to warp reality into ever more depressing states, but this one takes the cake,” the commenter added.

The Space Base Delta 1 spokesperson said Guardians can bring their own from home or can also buy their own takeout containers from the on-base coffee shop — also fittingly named the “Bean Me Up Cafe.”

Additionally, Guardians can choose to sit and eat their meal entirely at the dining hall….

(6) MIESEL ART AUCTION RESULTS. [Item by Andrew Porter.] Here are screencaps showing the final sale prices of Sandra Miesel’s sff art put up for sale at Ripley Auctions. (Only the sff art, none of the other items.) Click for larger images.

(7) STILL IN SEARCH OF (DIGITAL) BOMINABLE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] Following up on my item “(8) TERRY QUERY: WHERE’S ARNOLD?” in the September 24 Scroll (and some back-and-forth with a non-Filer PTerryphile), regarding the “recentlly ‘unlost’ story “Arnold, The Bominable Snowman,” which was, according to that scroll, “is/was supposed to be published online [in September 2024]:

The story is (now) available in an updated paperback version of Terry Pratchett’s (posthumous) collection, A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories… but not (based on my web search of my library’s e-holdings) Hoopla; Amazon/Kindle (and Amazon general search); nor a general web search), available online (yet).

If anybody knows more (ideally, when/e-where), my friend (via me) would like to know, as, no doubt, will many Filers.

(One guess is that it’s online in some UK site, outside of where my searches are searching.)

(Yes, I know, one could buy the new version or borrow/request it from one’s library. Or switch to Linux and LibreOffice–oh wait, wrong discussion…)

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born October 6, 1950 — David Brin, 74.

By Paul Weimer: It’s Kevin Costner’s fault that the work of David Brin came to my attention. When the adaptation of The Postman, warts and all, came to the screen, I discovered to my surprise I had not at that time read any of the work of David Brin. I set to rectify that, starting with The Postman…which, to my mystified surprise, I found I preferred the plot of the movie in many respects.  Undeterred, I hit my stride with reading his Uplift novels, revelling in the grand SF idea of species across the galaxy raising others to sentience–but who raised Humanity?  

But my favorite David Brin novel is probably Kiln People. Ostensibly a mystery novel, the big damn idea of Kiln People, being able to make copies of yourself to do various tasks and functions, is such a compelling one that I felt myself propelled on the strength of the premise and its implications for work, humanity, mortality and much more. Even more than the Uplift novels, it embodies the good of Brin’s fiction and thought. 

But Brin is an author whom I can disagree with, especially when it comes to Star Wars. I find Brin’s criticism and denigration of Star Wars to be, I think, way way too much. Sure, it’s a Campbellian monomyth hero chosen one narrative. But I think his criticism is way overpowered (and goes to far too much length) for the arguments he is making. I do get they come from a place of passion and sincere belief, but it is not one that I share. 

David Brin

(9) COMICS SECTION.

(10) TYPEWRITER COMEBACK. [Item by Andrew Porter.] PBS News Weekend tells “Why typewriters are having a renaissance in the digital age”

…Take a look inside this South Philadelphia shop called Philly Typewriter and you’ll see the renaissance of something many consider a relic of the past. And now it’s gotten a boost from a 21st century icon. Singer Taylor Swift using a vintage Royal 10 typewriter in the video Fortnight, the chart topping single off her latest album, the Tortured Poets Department….

Andrew Porter remembers:

I used to use a Royal portable that my father used when he was going to school in the 1930s. It came in a big case with a carrying handle. Used it for many years. 

Then my stepfather swiped an Underwood office machine from his office for me (he was the publisher, could get away with that) that I used for ALGOL and other stuff, until I bought my Selectric directly from IBM in 1968. They said I was the first person who’d ever bought one from them who didn’t work in an office. $105 down and $35 a month payment until it was paid off.

As I’ve posted before, when I got a computer, I had my Selectric serviced, then it went into the closet, and ultimately I gave it to Curt for his wife.

I think local doctors still use them, for filling out forms in triplicate.

My desk in 1974, exactly where I’m typing this now (and mailing labels: I remember them, too!):

(11) SECRETS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL BUGS. “The Oldest Termite Mound? 34,000 Years and Counting” — an unlocked article in the New York Times.

… Her appreciation for termites stems from a project that she recently oversaw in Namaqualand, a region of desert scrubland along the west coast of South Africa and into Namibia. There, some 27 percent of the landscape is covered with low, sandy mounds that were built by the southern harvester termite, Microhodotermes viator. Inside the mounds are vast labyrinths of chambers, tunnels and nests that extend up to 11 feet underground. The locals call them heuweltjies, which means “little hills” in Afrikaans.

Three years ago, Dr. Francis and her field research team set out to find why the groundwater along the Buffels River in Namaqualand was saline. “The groundwater salinity seemed to be specifically related to the location of these heuweltjies,” she said. The investigators reasoned that radiocarbon dating could pinpoint when the minerals stored in the termite mounds had seeped into the groundwater.

The investigators were surprised to find that the heuweltjies were far older than any active termite structures known to exist. As detailed in a paper that the researchers published this spring in the journal Science of the Total Environment, one of the three mounds selected for dating has been continually occupied by termite colonies for 34,000 years. It is more than 30,000 years older than the previous record-holder, a mound in Brazil built by a different termite species….

(12) GOING DEEP. “NASA’s laser comms demo makes deep space record, completes first phase” at Phys.org.

…NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology demonstration broke yet another record for laser communications this summer by sending a laser signal from Earth to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft about 290 million miles (460 million kilometers) away. That’s the same distance between our planet and Mars when the two planets are farthest apart.

Soon after reaching that milestone on July 29, the technology demonstration concluded the first phase of its operations since launching aboard Psyche on Oct. 13, 2023….

(13) LET’S TREAD BOLDLY 2 — SPACE TRAVEL RADIATION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Going into space is fraught with dangers: you can get stuck in orbit (Marooned); have a critical computer glitch (2001); have your crew quarters destroyed (Dark Star); encounter a meteor shower (Pitch Black); have mental issues (Forbidden Planet); get left behind (The Martian), get a blocked toilet due to the Russian, potato-heavy diet (The Big Bang Theory); encounter rogue space junk (Gravity)… among much else.  Among the ‘much else’ are the radiation belts surrounding the Earth.  These are caused by the Earth’s magnetic field trapping solar wind positive and negative particles, accelerating them to the poles where they enter the Earth’s upper atmosphere to the visual delight of spectators. Associated risks include cancer, cataracts, degenerative diseases and tissue reactions which makes space travel far more hazardous than being at a convention after the bar has run dry. (Honest!) So, what to do?

Well, for the International Space Station there is little problem as its orbit is below the inner Van Allen belt.  But if you want to go anywhere more interesting, you have to go through the Van Allen belts.  Here the recent Artemis mission with the unmanned Orion capsule that went around the Moon (how I remember the run-up to Christmas with Apollo 8) took detailed measurements from various place inside the craft.

This research has just been published.  The Orion craft traversed both the lower (more proton rich) and higher (more electron rich) belts. They report on radiation measurements at differing shielding locations inside the vehicle, a fourfold difference in dose rates from differently located detectors was observed during proton-belt passes that are similar to large, reference solar-particle events encountered in interplanetary travel. Interplanetary cosmic-ray dose equivalent rates in Orion were as much as 60% lower than previous observations from the Apollo missions. Furthermore, a change in orientation of the spacecraft during the proton-belt transit resulted in a reduction of radiation dose rates of around 50%. These measurements validate the Orion for future crewed exploration and inform future human spaceflight mission design. What happens in the future will depend heavily on shielding, trajectory, the Solar cycle and severity of Solar particle events. The problem is that manned interplanetary missions have good reasons to prefer long missions in light vehicles. (Lighter vehicles and short missions use less fuel and short missions shorten exposure.) So radiation risks will remain a key challenge for human space exploration.

The primary research is George, S. P., et al (2024) “Space radiation measurements during the Artemis I lunar mission”. Nature, vol. 634, p48-52.

(14) GOING WITH THE FLOW. [Item by N.] This info comes a little late, but on closer inspection, this film has fantastical elements! Good, because it looks and sounds stunning. Set for a limited release in NY and LA on November 22 and a wide release in the rest of the US on December 6. (Those in France get it earlier on October 30). “’Flow,’ An Edge-Of-Your-Seat Survival Film, Gets U.S. Trailer, Release Date” at Cartoon Brew.

A wondrous journey, through realms natural and mystical, Flow follows a courageous cat after his home is devastated by a great flood. Teaming up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog to navigate a boat in search of dry land, they must rely on trust, courage, and wits to survive the perils of a newly aquatic planet. From the boundless imagination of the award-winning Gints Zilbalodis (Away) comes a thrilling animated spectacle as well as a profound meditation on the fragility of the environment and the spirit of friendship and community. Steeped in the soaring possibilities of visual storytelling, Flow is a feast for the senses and a treasure for the heart.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Hmm. Seems genre adjacent. Or perhaps adjacent to genre adjacent: Ryan George’s “How Psychics Argue”.

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, N., Paul Weimer, Daniel Dern, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

Pixel Scroll 9/24/24 Tales From Scrollographic Pixels

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(1) F&SF COVER REVEAL. The cover of the Summer 2024 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is by Mondolithic Studios.

(2) ADDED ATTRACTIONS. “The Obsession with Extra-Illustrating Books” discussed by The Huntington blog.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, an obsession spread among bibliophiles for extra-illustrating or grangerizing books. Readers would supplement the pages of an already published book by inserting prints and related materials acquired from other sources. This process would often result in a huge expansion of the original volume, a ballooning that could easily stretch the book to bursting, requiring rebinding into additional volumes to hold the interleaved material. Where did this practice come from? Who thought of doing it in the first place?

In 1769, a country vicar named James Granger (1723–1776) published A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution. A guide for collectors of portrait prints, the book cataloged and gave brief descriptions of significant personages in British history as well as directed readers to the most desirable engraved portraits of those subjects for their collections.

Granger’s friend Richard Bull (1721–1805), a member of Parliament and an avid collector, went well beyond using the book to find and procure the recommended prints for his collection. Instead, he dismantled and cut up Granger’s text, placing relevant passages with the corresponding engravings on large backing sheets that served as new pages, and then he bound all these pages together. This process radically altered and expanded the structure and contents of the original book.

Granger’s A Biographical History of England, published as four quarto volumes 9 inches tall, expanded in Bull’s hands to 35 folio volumes with leaves 23 to 28 inches tall, filled with 14,500 portrait prints. What had once been a work free of images—except for Granger’s portrait—became a mixed-media compendium of British historical figures. Today, it is known as the Bull Granger. The Huntington holds all 35 volumes of this first-identified project of extra-illustration, traditionally defined….

(3) HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY. Cat Rambo’s Rumor Has It, sequel to You Sexy Thing and Devil’s Gun, was released today.

(4) DREAMHAVEN BOOKS ACQUIRES ANOTHER STORE’S INVENTORY. Announced today on Facebook:

DreamHaven Books of Minneapolis is pleased to announce the acquisition of the remaining inventory of the 1990s Colorado bookstore, The Little Bookshop of Horrors.  The Arvada Colorado bookstore specialized in Horror, Science Fiction and Mystery books and hosted frequent signings with authors.  The owners, Doug and Tomi (Cheri) Lewis were also publishers of Roadkill Press who produced a number of chapbooks with the authors they would host.

The store closed after the death of Tomi Lewis in 1996 and Doug locked the doors and simply walked away.  The store and it’s impressive inventory would sit for many years until it was more recently moved into a storage unit.  Greg Ketter of DreamHaven Books agreed to purchase the remaining stock and has transferred it to his brick & mortar store in Minneapolis.  The books are now being integrated into the store stock and certain items listed on ABE Books and eBay.

There are many signed books by Joe R. Lansdale, Dan Simmons,  Edward Bryant, Harlan Ellison, John Dunning, Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake and many others.  Hundreds of limited edition and small press books are also included.  Want lists are welcome (DreamHaven will not be able to quote books by phone; they are still sorting through hundreds of boxes of books).

(5) GET ON BOARD. The SFWA Blog continues its series on board game playtesting with “Playtesting TTRPG Stories”.

Don’t Help Playtesters

Give the material you’ve produced to a playtesting group without additional explanation or support. Effective game writing must stand without outside explanation.

A common error is supporting the players or gamemaster if they’re confused about how a narrative element should be presented or how some mechanics function. Observing playtests is a good source of data, but it’s best not to interfere directly. Watching someone get your game wrong is an important step in revising the text so that future customers will get it right….

(6) VIDEO GAME ACTORS STRIKE ACTION. Variety reports “’League of Legends’ Added to Actors’ Video Game Strike”.

After previously being exempt from inclusion in the ongoing video game actors strike, Riot Games‘ massively multiplayer online role-playing game “League of Legends” has been added to the list of blocked titles by SAG-AFTRA amid the union’s accusation of unfair labor practices against Formosa Interactive.

According to SAG-AFTRA, Formosa, a union signatory that provides voiceover services for “League of Legends,” is accused of trying to “cancel” one of its struck video games “shortly after the start of SAG-AFTRA’s video game strike” on July 26. SAG-AFTRA has filed a charge against the company with the National Labor Relations Board.

“When they were told that was not possible, they secretly transferred the game to a shell company and sent out casting notices for ‘NON-UNION’ talent only,” the union said. “SAG-AFTRA charges that these serious actions are egregious violations of core tenets of labor law – that employers cannot interfere with performers’ rights to form or join a union and they cannot discriminate against union performers. The unilateral and surreptitious transfer of union work to a ‘non-union’ shell company is an impermissible and appalling attempt to evade a strike action and destroy performers’ rights under labor law.”

It should be noted SAG-AFTRA is not accusing the Riot Games title of unfair labor practices, but rather calling for a strike against “League of Legends” because it is the most high profile title produced by Formosa Interactive.

In a statement Tuesday, “League of Legends” publisher Riot Games said: “‘League of Legends’ has nothing to do with the complaint mentioned in SAG-AFTRA’s press release. We want to be clear: Since becoming a union project five years ago, ‘League of Legends’ has only asked Formosa to engage with Union performers in the US and has never once suggested doing otherwise. In addition, we’ve never asked Formosa to cancel a game that we’ve registered. All of the allegations in SAG-AFTRA’s press release relating to canceling a game or hiring non-union talent relate to a non-Riot game, and have nothing to do with ‘League’ or any of our games.”…

(7) O CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN! “Writer David Gerrold said Star Trek held together because of William Shatner” at Redshirts Always Die.

…In The Fifty-Year Mission The First Twenty-Five Years by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, Gerrold was reported as having said that “all of the movies and all of the episodes hold together because Shatner holds it together.”

Gerrold pointed out that Spock [Leonard Nimoy] needed someone to play off of, and that was Captain Kirk. When Spock had scenes that didn’t involve the captain, he didn’t think they were interesting.

“The scenes where Spock doesn’t have Shatner to play off of are not interesting. If you look at Spock with his mom or dad, it’s very ponderous. But Spock working with Kirk has sthe magic and it plays very well, and people give all of the credit to Nimoy, not to Shatner.”…

(8) TERRY QUERY: WHERE’S ARNOLD? [Item by Daniel Dern.] My friend (and former boss) Paul Schindler is having no luck finding information, much less the online thing itself, of Sir Pterry’s story “Arnold, The Bominable Snowman” which is/was supposed to be published online this month (September 2024).

See Item 2 in the May 11, 2024 Pixel Scroll for more about the story proper, the onlineification, contest, etc:

(2) PTERRY SURPRISE. The Terry Pratchett website has announced “Another lost Terry Pratchett story found”

Thanks (on behalf of Paul, who I’ll advise of any follow-ups)

(9) TEDDY HARVIA CARTOON.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born September 24, 1934 – John Brunner. (Died 1995.)  

By Paul Weimer: The man who saw our future. Or multiple futures.  Yes, I know science fiction is really about the present much more than “predicting the future”, but take a look around at our year of 2024, with random violence, political instability, a kaleidoscope of fashions and trends, social divisions, global terrorism, extremism, billionaires running amok. And also, gay marriage, affirmative action, electric cars, the use of marijuana and more. 

John Brunner

Aside from the fact that the random violence in the book is NOT gun-based, we seem to be living very much in the world of Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. But that’s not all. In The Sheep Look Up, we get environmental degradation, a Republican President who says the answer to all our problems is “Deregulation”, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a degradation of quality of life across the board. Or The Jagged Orbit, where a cabal of Republicans are going to use computers to swing an election. Or The Shockwave Rider, showing a United Stated dominated by computer networks a la the internet, even as infrastructure crumbles and crumbles.

Reading (or rereading Brunner) in 2024 can be a lot. 

Beyond the gloom and doom of Brunner’s trilogy, though, there is much lighter fare if you want to try one of SF’s greatest visionaries. Out of his large oeuvre, my favorite is The Squares of the City. Boyd Hakluyt is a traffic and systems engineer who is hired by a fictional South American country to resolve a traffic and transit problem. While there, he gets wrapped up in a plot between the government and the not so loyal opposition, in a literal chess match where Boyd finds himself a piece on the board. It’s a taut and fun political thriller that might be a bit light on the SF, but high on tension, drama, and if you like chess, you will love this book. And then there is The Infinitive of Go, which is the type of multiverse novel whose implications slowly creep on you. 

(11) COMICS SECTION.

(12) DIAL THAT DOWN. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The folks behind HBO’s new “workplace comedy” about the creation of a superhero franchise movie claim they had to take what happens in real life movie making down a notch. Otherwise, they say, no one would believe them. It would just be too silly. The Hollywood Reporter has the story of The Franchise.

There’s a situation discussed in HBO’s upcoming series The Franchise — a comedy about the behind-the-scenes struggle to make a superhero movie — that sounds rather absurd: A director laboring away on a fictional Marvel-like film gradually realizes the studio brass has changed their mind about the project’s creative direction and started secretly shooting the “real” movie somewhere else, while he continues to film scenes destined to be scrapped.

Yet this has actually happened to at least one filmmaker working on a franchise movie, according to the show’s producers. 

“All the research we did — and we did tons, we spoke to so many people — the actual chaos [on superhero films] was really surprising,” says The Franchise creator Jon Brown (Succession), who made the series along with Armando Iannucci (Veep) and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (1917). “People think these movies are laid out in neat phases for the next 10 years. Then you hear about a set where, in the morning, a limo literally pulls up, the window comes down, and they hand out new script pages. Or producers on set have eight versions of the same script open, and they go through each script, cherry picking lines, and then they Frankenstein a scene out of nothing. Or the studio sends an actor to the set in the morning and they basically rewrite the day’s entire scene [to accommodate the last-minute cast addition]. You would assume all this was decided two years ago, but it’s happened a lot across Marvel and DC movies.”

As a result, the writers of The Franchise found themselves in the rather odd position of sometimes making story choices for their show that were less wild than the real-life anecdotes they were hearing from industry insiders. “You think, ‘I know this is real, but it just seems too silly,'” Brown said. “So we sometimes have to take it back a step, because you don’t think people will believe it unless they know it’s true.”…

(13) COLLECTORS ITEM. Are you in the market for a complete run of Weird Tales? This one can be yours for $150,000. “RARE! Complete Set of Weird Tales” at eBay.

(14) LATEST EDITION SONIC SCREWDRIVER. “Doctor Who fans unveils Fifteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver – pre-order now” — Radio Times tells what button to push.

While it’s been a few months since the adventures of the Fifteenth Doctor and companion Ruby Sunday, the excitement lives on, as fans can now pre-order the Doctor’s trust sonic screwdriver!

The screwdriver is available to pre-order from Character Options at £39.99….

“Doctor Who The Fifteenth Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver Deluxe Edition” at Character Online.

The Fifteenth Doctor’s sonic screwdriver boasts a completely revamped shape and design, with its curved edges, making it the most unique rendition of his favourite bit of tech yet.

The deluxe version, available only on Character online, boasts an exclusive ‘electro plated’ finish making it look like real polished steel and brass. It features two modes of operation, Open and Closed, as well as five brand new and totally unique sound and light effects, with each accessed by a different button sequence.

On this deluxe version of The Fifteenth Doctor’s device there are many new features including a uniquely shaped, swivel-out Power Core complete with flickering Power Crystal Chamber and on/off sounds. There are also three distinctly different sounds with accompanying light FX; a standard sonic sound, a data sound, and a lifeform scan sound. The spring-out and retract Emitter section also has its own sound and finally the slide out analyser comes with its own sound completing the sound FX.

The sonic comes beautifully presented in Regeneration style packaging and is the perfect piece of memorabilia to add to any Doctor Who collection.

(15) IF PUSH COMES TO SHOVE. “Nuclear blast could save Earth from large asteroid, scientists say” – the Guardian has the story.

Scientists, as well as Hollywood movie producers, have long looked to nuclear bombs as a promising form of defence should a massive asteroid appear without warning on a collision course with Earth.

Now, researchers at a US government facility have put the idea on a firm footing, showing how such a blast might save the world in the first comprehensive demo of nuclear-assisted planetary defence.

Physicists at Sandia National Laboratories, whose primary mission is to ensure the safety and security of the US nuclear arsenal, recorded in nanosecond detail how an immense pulse of radiation unleashed by a nuclear blast could vaporise the side of a nearby asteroid.

The event is so violent that it heats the surface to tens of thousands of degrees, producing a rapidly expanding ball of gas capable of nudging the asteroid off course. Do the sums correctly and the shunt should be sufficient to put doomsday on hold.

(16) TEN YEARS OF SCIENCE AND FUTURISM. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] As regular Filers may have spotted, I occasionally throw a link 770’s way to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur’s YouTube Channel (among much other material). The video item on “Transcendence” last week on File770 actually marked the 10th anniversary of that channel but I failed to include a mention that and that that episode also happened to coincide with Isaac’s 44th birthday.

As Mike knows, but you most likely don’t, I am one of the rare, endangered western-nation species that is not on the internet at home (actually, in the UK currently some 35% UK households solely occupied by over 65s are not on the internet so actually I am not as rare a creature as many of you may suspect – so always respect digital access diversity – the recent Glasgow Worldcon was not). What happens is this, working almost next door for an hour three or four times a week at the library cybercafé, if I spot an item of likely interest to Filers and then pass it Mike’s way for him to decide whether or not to include. This is an important filter as usually I spot things without looking at them in depth (I do that later at home having downloaded whatever it is to memory stick), so some duff material can get through and Mike commendably filters that out. This survey of the landscape is no hardship on my part as I have to keep an eye out for material for the seasonal SF² Concatenation. That zine has just three principal editions a year, whereas Mike’s is daily, so it makes sense for File770 to have first dibs as it could be up to four months before anything I (and other providers) air in Concatenation. Mike only uses 0.01% of the stuff I send him, so if you want to see other SF (through more a European/British prism) & science coverage then feel free to drop in on SF² Concatenation just three times a year.

Meanwhile, back to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, the previously linked “Transcendence” episode was number 465 in Isaac’s run or actually 700 in that series if you include Isaac Arthur’s shorts, live-streams and specials. Ohio-based Isaac is also currently the incumbent President of the National (US) Space Society, which I guess is the US analogue of our British Interplanetary Society. As for Isaac’s future episodes, of applied science interest is a forthcoming one on “Is Privacy Going Extinct” on 26th September (2024), and of SFnal/science interest “The Fermi Paradox: Large Moons” on 3rd October. Then, in more of an SFnal vein there will be one on “Fungal Aliens” on 13th October. You can check these out at www.youtube.com/@isaacarthurSFIA. He has more background info at www.IsaacArthur.net.

I should point out that Isaac’s channel is not the only one I monitor. His channel has a few occasional items of SF/SF interest for my catholic taste, but as for some of my other favourites there is: for pure physics I enjoy Matt O’Dowd at PBS Space-Time; for palaeo-environmental science (which is fairly close to my own specialist area) PBS Eons; for astrophysics Dave Kipping at Cool Worlds; for astronomy Becky Smethurst at Doctor Becky and for the presentation of the sheer love of finding out about SF Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult and that of the joy of SF book collecting Book Pilled. There are, of course, other channels out there, and I dare say Mike would welcome your recommendations in the comments…

(17) SECRET ORIGINS OF PLOKTA, PT. 1. The Fanac Fanhistory Zoom for September 2024 is online:

This fannish group (aka the Plokta Cabal) burst on the scene in May 1996 with the fanzine Plokta, which went on to receive two Best Fanzine Hugos, 2 Nova Awards for Best Fanzine, and Hugo nominations each year from 1999 to 2008. They are energetic, quirky and very, very funny. They are writers, artists, con runners, Worldcon bidders and fan fund winners.

In part 1 (of 2), Steve Davies, Sue Mason, Alison Scott and Mike Scott, recount how they came into fandom and found each other. They tell entertaining stories of their fannish lives, from convention newsletters to the celebrated Plokta to the glories of providing a unique in-joke badge to each member of a convention. You’ll learn what a SMURF is, hear strong opinions about staples, and find out just what voodoo board spam can be. Plokta was one of the first web fanzines, and came together differently than most other fanzines. The group dynamics and interactions that created it are on full display in this recording. It’s great fun to watch, and it’s very, very clear that it was great fun to live.

[Thanks to Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Gordon Van Gelder, Paul Weimer, Michael J. Walsh, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, and SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Bill.]

Pixel Scroll 8/6/24 The Problem Of Scroll 13

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(1) S.O.S. FOR TARAL’S COLLECTIONS.  Steven Baldassarra announced on Facebook  that the late Taral Wayne’s apartment needs to be emptied of his collections and stuff, and his sister has offered them to friends.

I am posting this message out on behalf of Christine Miller, Taral Wayne‘s sister. Please spread this message out to those who knew Taral:

“If anyone is interested in his art, toys or fanzines, please reach out to me, Christine Miller. I have to get his treasures out of the building asap.

“When I last spoke to Taral about funeral arrangements (although he was convinced he would live forever), he wasn’t interested in one. His remains are being cremated and then he will be buried with our mother in North York. At the moment, I’m just trying to get his treasures out of his apartment and don’t have the band width to think much past that.”

Taral Wayne (1951-2024) died July 31.

(2) FINALIST VANISHES FROM DRAGON AWARDS BALLOT. For one brief and shining moment Cedar Sanderson’s cover for Goblin Market was a 2024 Dragon Awards finalist in the Best Illustrative Book Cover. Then it suddenly wasn’t. Sanderson appeared on the originally released version of the ballot, but hours later she was missing. No explanation has been given, and her publisher demands to know why.

Jonna Hayden, Production Manager for Raconteur Press, sent this email to the Rac Press substack/newsletter subscribers this evening: “Concerning the Dragon Awards”:

In an effort towards transparency, we have sent the following letter to the Dragon Awards team, via Dragon Con:

“I am the Production Manager for Raconteur Press, and our Lead Designer is Cedar Sanderson. Cedar was nominated for a Dragon Award for her work on our book “Goblin Market” and achieved a place on the final ballot in the category “Best Illustrative Cover” for 2024. Or so we thought. Several hours after the final ballot was announced (and we proudly shared the information) Cedar’s name was removed.

“We were surprised by this removal–there has been no explanation, no replacement name added to the list, and no comment of any kind from the Dragon Awards as to the reason behind it. Cedar has not been contacted, and multiple emails from many, many fans have gone unanswered.

“In their frustration, her fans have been emailing, messaging, and calling us, to see if we have any communication or information as to the ‘why’ of this. We are, unfortunately, equally in the dark. We’ve been referring them to the contact form on the Awards page, but no information has been forthcoming. The lack of any comment on the Dragon Awards’ part is now beginning to lead to speculation as to the integrity of the awards as a whole. In light of the recent Hugo issues at the China Worldcon, I would think your organization would be striving to maintain the utmost transparency.

“Is there any plan whatsoever to address this? Will there be a statement of any kind as to the reasons? I would like to return to my regular job of publishing great short fiction, and not be fielding the frustrated and angry messages of fans who nominated her in good faith.

“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, and sharing it will help.

“Please let us know what the the plan for this is going forward.

“Thank you.”

If you haven’t had your fill of speculation, see the comments here.

(3) THERE IS A SEASON, TURN, TURN, TURN ON THE TV. Abigail Nussbaum says, “In its second season, the already-excellent Interview With the Vampire became one of the best and most entertaining shows on TV. My review in Strange Horizons discusses how the show both honors and subverts its source material.” “Interview With the Vampire Season 2”.

Published in 1976, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has a fair claim to being one of the most influential novels of the late twentieth century. Wildly successful in its own right—spawning some dozen sequels, several related series of novels, and a myriad film and TV adaptations—it all but singlehandedly reshaped the popular perception of the vampire. Rice’s vampires are brooding, tormented beings, haunted both by the need to kill and the crushing loneliness of eternal life. They seek companionship—which is to say, thinly veiled homoerotic bonds—with fellow immortals, but these relationships often turn rancid due to the beloved’s similar tormentedness. It’s a portrait that slid into self-parody almost as soon as it made its appearance, and which later creators have found themselves pushing against (“People still fall for that Anne Rice routine,” a decidedly nontormented vampire quips in an early episode of Buffy). But the very fact that this pushback feels necessary speaks to the trope’s influence and reach.

AMC’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire—which premiered in 2022, and whose second season aired earlier this summer—wears that legacy lightly, and even playfully…

(4) TIME ON THEIR HANDS. T.R. Napper arrives in Glasgow in time to exchange drolleries with George R.R. Martin.

(5) SEE DELANY SPEECH. Posted to YouTube yesterday: Samuel R. Delany at the Free Library of Philadelphia on June 15, 2024 in conversation with composer and library trainee Mark Inchoco: “How SF Dances to the Music of Time”.

(6) NOT TERRY’S GHOST. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] Private Eye is a long running British news/satirical magazine, that sells more copies than some UK national newspapers.  In their current issue (#1629, dated 2nd-15th August, so should be available in shops throughout the duration of the Glasgow Worldcon), their books section makes some interesting claims about the authorship of last year’s Hugo Best Related Work winner.

In his 2014 collected non-fiction book, A Slip of the Keyboard, Discworld writer Terry Pratchett had some advice for anyone who saw a celebrity author at a book signing.

“Don’t pass comment if they spend a lot of time reading their book while they’re in the shop.  It may be the first time they’ve seen it.  Do not offer to help them with the longer words.”

Ironic, then, that the official Pratchett biography, A Life with Footnotes, was “co-written” by ghostwriter Giles Smith – and not, as advertised on the cover, solely by Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s former assistant.  Wilkins went on to collect, amongst other awards, a 2023 Hugo for the book he did not write – a prestigious bauble Pratchett himself never managed to secure.

Giles Smith’s page on the UK Simon & Schuster website states that “in the last ten years, he has been the ghost-writer for eight Sunday Times bestselling autobiographies”, although there is no mention of this work on his agent’s site.

Note: credit is due to Kári Tulinius whose Bluesky post is what brought this to my attention.

The books column also includes a section on the Neil Gaiman allegations, but given that the magazine was published last week, is out-of-date with the latest developments, and also has a slightly odd take (in my opinion), such as whether this will affect the number of books that Gaiman writes blurbs for.

(7) READERS’ INTEREST AROUSED. NOR IS THAT ALL. On romantasy and other literary erotica: “My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why”, Zoe Williams told Guardian readers.

I spent a fortnight reading nothing but smut and I don’t need to give you a reason. But since there is one, here it is: business is booming in the publishing world of love and sex. Aficionados draw fine distinctions – between romance and erotica; “steamy” and “smutty”; fantasy and saga fiction – and endlessly subdivide the genres, but the takeaway is that the stigma around what used to be called “books that women like” has gone. And, as the UK literary agent Alice Lutyens puts it: “The steamier the sex, the better the book does.”

I started two books simultaneously, which just happened to span the gamut, from the almost completely chaste The Stars Too Fondly, by Emily Hamilton, to the most pornographic thing I’ve ever read (and I’ve read De Sade): Heat Clinic, by Alexis B Osborne. So, I could give you a take on the difference between romance and erotica, but I would rather throw it to an expert. Leah Koch started the independent romantic bookshop Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles with her sister, Bea, in 2016 (they recently opened a second shop in New York). She says readers tend to assume erotica is sexier. “The technical definition is that, in erotica, character development happens from sexual situations. We stock both.”…

… if there is one thing that has come to pass, maybe through TikTok, maybe just by the march of time, it is that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or any other kind. They don’t care if they are reading an Omegaverse novel in public; they don’t even care if someone mistakenly thinks it’s furry pornography. They don’t care if what they are reading could be mistaken for YA and they are not young. They don’t care if the patriarchy thinks they are silly. Which means, in the publishing world of – yup, I’m still calling it this – smut, pretty much anything could happen.

(8) PRO TIPS. Charlie Jane Anders shares valuable insights in “Another Way To Think About ‘Conflict’ and ‘Stakes’ In Your Fiction” at Happy Dancing.

1) Conflict

Here is a story that contains plenty of conflict: “I was hungry. I really wanted a sandwich. So I got up and went to the fridge and made a sandwich. The End.” A situation is introduced, the protagonist has a need. They need a sandwich! What are they going to do? They’re going to make a sandwich. The conflict is resolved — we can all relax now.

Here’s another story that has a lot of conflict: “My friend and I were both hungry and there was only one sandwich. So we each had half a sandwich and it tasted really good, and I was happy to be eating a sandwich with my friend.” OH MY GOD. There was only one sandwich. But we figured it out. 

What I’m trying to say is that conflict doesn’t mean antagonism. Nobody has to be baring their teeth or vowing bloody murder. Nor does conflict have to be massive and dramatic, with bodily fluids going everywhere and people snarling angrily.  In fact, much of the time in real life, “conflict” is just people dealing with the challenges and frictions of being in the world.

And of course, stories don’t need to have any conflict in them at all. You can have a story where it’s literally just like, “My friend and I hung out and watched the sunset, and it was nice.” That’s a story with a beginning, middle and an end. That’s very satisfying.

But even if you want to have some conflict in your story, conflict does not have to mean a certain level of drama or horribleness. A conflict doesn’t have to be intransigent or insurmountable, or involve anyone chopping off anyone else’s limbs….

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Lis Carey.]

August 6, 1926 – Janet Asimov. (Died 2019.) 

By Lis Carey: Janet Opal Jeppson earned a medical degree from New York University Medical School, completed a residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, and in 1960 graduated from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she continued to work, practicing psychiatry and psychoanalysis until 1986. She continued to practice and publish medical papers under the name of J.O. Jeppson, even after her marriage to Isaac Asimov. 

Janet Jeppson and Isaac Asimov. Photo by and (c) Andrew Porter

She started writing children’s science fiction in 1970, also published as by J.O. Jeppson. The other change in Jeppson’s life that year was that she started dating Isaac Asimov, after he separated from his first wife. They married in 1973, after the divorce became final.

Some of Jeppson’s solo science fiction included The Second Experiment and The Package in Hyperspace. Together with Isaac, she wrote the Norby Chronicles series, which ran to eleven volumes. However, Isaac is reported to have said that the work was 90% Janet’s, with him just doing a final read-thru and polish, but his name “was wanted on the book for the betterment of sales”.

She was married to Isaac until his death in 1992, from complications of HIV, due to a transfusion during bypass surgery in 1983. Based on symptoms, Janet suspected HIV, and pushed for an HIV test, but doctors resisted until he was extremely ill. They also pressured her to keep the results secret due to fear of public reaction, and so it was not revealed until ten years after his death.

Married to a strong personality, she kept her own space and her own career, while being a loyal partner, and a determined advocate for him in his final illness.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) AUREALIS AWARDS OPEN FOR ENTRIES. The 2024 Aurealis Awards, Australia’s premier awards for speculative fiction, are for works created by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published for the first time between January 1, 2024 and December 31, 2024.

The administrators encourage publishers and authors to enter all works published already this year by September 30, 2024, then subsequent publications as they are released, so their judges have time to consider each entry carefully.

Full Rules and FAQ are on the Aurealis Awards website.

(12) IT’S GONE, JIM. “GameStop Kills Game Informer Magazine And Takes Website Offline” – Kotaku has the magazine’s obituary.

Game Informer, the longest-running gaming magazine in the U.S., is officially dead and GameStop killed it. It began publishing in 1991 and has been one of the last remaining physical gaming magazines in the world, with cover stories that continued to share deep dives and exclusive interviews on the biggest games coming out, from Final Fantasy: VII Rebirth to Star Wars Outlaws. No more….

(13) A DAY IN THE DEATH. Brenton Dickieson sees a connection between Tolstoy and Lewis in “The Living Lie, But Dead Men Tell the Truth: The Screwtape Letters and Ivan Ilych” at A Pilgrim in Narnia.

In Leo Tolstoy’s brilliant novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), there is a curious pun in the English translation I use (Aylmer Maude):

“The dead man lay, as dead men always lie” (96)…

…Doctors who lie, friends who lie, dying in comfort believing there is the hope of life and separated from the danger of a sense of their true mortal conditions. There it is.

Ivan Ilych’s condition is not great evil-doing, but “contented worldliness.” Ivan has lived in wealth, fulfilling his ambitions, playing whist with adoring friends of the same class and intelligence, fulfiling the role of a clerk with precision, even if his roles of father, husband, neighbour, and justice-keeper are somewhat ignored. Even in his dying days, he cannot realize death in his own frame. And when he begins to suspect that the death rattle is near, he cannot accept that his life has been meaningless. Not just meaningless, but a slow descent in inverse proportion to his imagined rise to social acceptance.

This is, of course, precisely what Screwtape would want….

(14) (NOT JUST) FOR THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Power On The Moon? A Giant Tower Could Light The Way For NASA Astronauts” says HotHardware.

Space company Honeybee has proposed a 100 meter tall tower that will potentially light the path for future NASA Artemis astronauts on the moon. The LUNARSABER (Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution) tower is a deployable structure that integrates solar power, communications, and more, all in one package.

As NASA and other space agencies look to begin building lunar bases, they will all have to overcome some obvious obstacles. Perhaps one of the greatest of those will be how to generate power where none yet exists. Honeybee, a company owned by Blue Origin, believes it has created a solution that will not only solve the lunar power problem, but also “shine light on new possibilities, increasing operating hours for human and robotic missions on the Moon.”

“LUNARSABER can turn night into day in the deepest craters on the Moon,” remarked Kris Zacny, VP of Exploration Systems at Honeybee Robotics. “It is truly a game-changing system that will pave the way for a lunar economy.”

Some may be wondering how on Earth Honeybee expects to get a 100 meter tall tower onto the Moon. Well, the simple answer is a technology called DIABLO (Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations). DIABLO utilizes a rolled piece of metal, and then bends it into a deployable cylindrical structure that can support heavy payloads, which then becomes the base for LUNARSABER.

In order to deliver power, solar panels will be deployed via one of two methods, depending on the tower’s location on the Moon….

(15) WAITING FOR GOLDBLUM. [Item by Daniel Dern.] “Netflix’s Kaos turns Jeff Goldblum into the all-powerful Zeus” – BGR has the story. “Jeff Goldblum’s new Netflix series Kaos is basically The Boys but about Greek mythology”

…Right away, the title of this eight-episode drama also gives you a little hint of what it’s all about. One of the animating principles here is that the world was born from chaos — and while Kaos is set in the modern era, it’s a sort of off-kilter, slightly askew version of it (thus, the modified spelling). In other words, there are no old men in the sky here wearing togas and hurling lightning bolts at Earth. What we get, instead, is a creepy Goldblum-as-Zeus laughing deliriously at his TV while watching scenes of devastation and commenting about how much he loves fire….

DPD, having watched the video, says “I’m not sure it’s ‘The Boys Go Greek’ and we’ll be waiting for it.”

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, Ersatz Culture, Lis Carey, Daniel Dern, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

2024 Prometheus Best Novel and Hall of Fame Winners

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The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced the Best Novel and Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction Prometheus Award winners for 2024.

THE PROMETHEUS AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

Critical Mass, by Daniel Suarez (Dutton) has won the 2024 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for novels published in 2023.

The citation says:

Set in the inner solar system, this fast-paced science fiction thriller follows engineer-entrepreneurs striving against the odds to use space-mined materials to build infrastructure in space for commercial development.

Heroic characters risk their lives in an audacious mission to complete a space station, allowing construction of a nuclear-powered spaceship and rescue of stranded crew members on the distant asteroid Ryugu. The resourceful band must achieve their goals amid shortsighted opposition, censorship, shifting alliances and international tensions of Earth governments.

Unusually realistic in depicting the perils of living and working in space, Suarez achieves a high level of plausible engineering speculation. Government is shown as the problem and cooperation through free enterprise as part of a space-based solution to problems on Earth.

Included is a plausible depiction of the creation of a functional, private, decentralized currency beyond the reach of Earth, relevant in this era of inflationary government fiat money.

The other 2023 Best Novel finalists were Theft of Fire, by Devon Eriksen (Devon Eriksen LLC); Swim Among the People,  by Karl K. Gallagher (Kelt Haven Press); God’s Girlfriend, by Dr. Insensitive Jerk (AKA Gordon Hanka) (Amazon); and Lord of a Shattered Land,  by Howard Andrew Jones (Baen Books).

 THE PROMETHEUS HALL OF FAME FOR BEST CLASSIC FICTION

The Truth, a 2000 novel by Terry Pratchett (HarperCollins), won the 2024 Best Classic Fiction award and will be inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.

Terry Pratchett in 2011.

The citation says:

First nominated for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2001, when it became a finalist, The Truth is part of Pratchett’s humorous but historically informed Discworld series.

This story revolves around the incidental founding by a struggling scribe of the Discworld’s first newspaper, using the newly invented printing press in the city of Ankh-Morpork. Amidst cutthroat competition, shadowy opponents, a political crisis and threats to a free and independent press, the newspaper evolves in the free market – just as real newspapers did historically.

All too timely in its focus on misinformation and its affirmation of the value of freedom of speech and the press as a bedrock principle sustaining free societies while serving as a vital check on criminality and corrupt government, the novel portrays how journalists find and report the facts (or not) and strive to communicate “the truth.”

Smart and sly, hilarious but serious, The Truth ultimately offers an inspirational tale of underdogs fighting for the truth against formidable opposition.

The other Prometheus Hall of Fame finalists were Orion Shall Rise, a 1983 novel (Timescape) by Poul Anderson; “The Trees,” a 1978 song by the Canadian rock group Rush; and Between the Rivers, a 1998 novel (TOR) by Harry Turtledove.

AWARDS CEREMONY. The 44th annual Prometheus Awards will be presented online, most likely on a Saturday afternoon in mid- to-late August, in a Zoom awards ceremony with three-time Best Novel winner Victor Koman as a speaker and presenter.

PROMETHEUS AWARDS HISTORY. The Prometheus Awards, sponsored by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), was first presented in 1979, making it one of the most enduring awards after the Nebula and Hugo awards, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently in sf.

In the words of the LFS:

For more than four decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that dramatize the perennial conflict between liberty and power, favor voluntary cooperation over institutionalized coercion, expose the abuses and excesses of coercive government, and/or critique or satirize authoritarian systems, ideologies and assumptions.

Above all, the Prometheus Awards strive to recognize speculative fiction that champions individual rights, based on the moral/legal principle of non-aggression as the ethical and practical foundation for peace, prosperity, progress, justice, tolerance, mutual respect, civility and civilization itself.

While the Best Novel category is limited to novels published in English for the first time during the previous calendar year, Hall of Fame nominees — which must have been published, performed, broadcast or released at least 20 years ago — may be in any narrative or dramatic form, including novels, novellas, stories, films, television series or episodes, plays, musicals, graphic novels, song lyrics, or verse.

The Best Novel winner receives a plaque with a one-ounce gold coin, and the Hall of Fame winner a plaque with a smaller gold coin.

[Based on a press release.]

Pixel Scroll 6/19/24 No Scroll Comes Between Me And My Pixel

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(1) RELIC OF FIRST WORLDCON. You have one day left to bid on Frank R. Paul’s artwork for the first Worldcon program book (1939) at Heritage Auctions. It was going for $925 when I looked earlier.

Frank R. Paul World Science Fiction Convention – Nycon Program Book Illustration Original Art (Nycon, 1939). From the first ever World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon) in 1939! And the art is by noted sci-fi artist Frank R. Paul, which makes this doubly desirable! The original art for this program banner was created in ink and signed in the lower right of the 20.5″ x 3.25″ image area. UV Glass-front framed to 29″ x 12.75″. Lightly toned, with some minor whiteout art clean-ups. In Very Good condition.
From the Roger Hill Collection.

(2) WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is the only genre work among six novels that have been shortlisted for Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. The complete list of finalists is at the link. The marketing copy for Bradley’s book says:

A boy meets a girl. The past meets the future. A finger meets a trigger. The beginning meets the end. England is forever. England must fall.

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel.

Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’…. 

(3) HOLD ‘EM BY THE NOSE AND KICK ‘EM IN THE ASS. At Fantasy Author’s Handbook, Philip Athans has an idea: “Let’s Reject Rejections”.

Your query to an agent has been rejected. Your short story was rejected by a magazine. You are a potato and are starting to show roots so the chef rejected you.

Aside from the potato thing, this happens so often to literally every writer, how does this not make us all feel like rejects?

And no one should feel like a reject.

But then, no agent can represent all the authors. No publisher can publish all the books. That means we have to figure out how to deal with rejection. The good news is that’s super easy. All you have to do is develop a thick skin. I heard skin thickening is offered by a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps for as little as €400,000 per treatment. It requires only one treatment per rejection letter, so most trillionaire authors should be able to soak that up. The rest of us will have to remain entirely human.

And no human wants to be, likes to be, feels they should be or deserve to be, rejected.

But then there’s that reality again: No agent can represent all the authors. No publisher can publish all the books.

We have to figure out not how to render ourselves immune to normal, healthy human emotional responses, but to, for lack of a better term, roll with it….

(4) THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME. “The stolen ruby slippers will be up for auction. Minnesota wants them back” reports NPR.

This weekend, Grand Rapids, Minnesota will honor its best-known former resident — Judy Garland.

And at its annual Judy Garland Festival, the city will fundraise to bring back a prized prop that the actress made famous. But, it won’t be an easy stroll down the Yellow Brick Road.

Minnesota lawmakers set aside $100,000 this year to help the Judy Garland Museum purchase the coveted ruby slippers of “The Wizard of Oz” fame. Experts expect the shoes could sell for a much higher price.

“They could sell for $1 million, they could sell for $10 million. They’re priceless,” says Joe Maddalena, Heritage Auctions executive vice president.

The ruby slippers are one of four sets remaining.

This pair’s unique story

The shoes were on display at Garland’s namesake museum in Grand Rapids in the summer of 2005 when a burglar struck. John Kelsch, the museum director at the time, says a man broke in through the back door and snatched the slippers….

(5) BICYCLE THIEF. [Item by Eric Hildeman.] Carl Klinger of the Milwaukee Steampunk Society had his penny farthing stolen and smashed. Fortunately, a fundraiser to get him a new one was successful. “Starship Fonzie #40 – Transcript”.

…What’s a penny farthing? It’s that old-timey sort of bicycle with the enormously huge wheel in front and a much smaller wheel in back. You know, the sort that Passpartout rode in the opening scenes of the 1956 film “Around the World in 80 Days,” starring David Niven. There’s also one on display in the Streets of Old Milwaukee exhibit in the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Well, who knows why it was stolen, but it was, and police were notified. Usually when a bike is stolen it’s never recovered, but this is a very unusual bicycle. Very tricky to ride, very obvious to spot. So the guy who’d stolen it noticed the news story regarding the theft, saw his own image caught on security camera, and apparently panicked. I guess he had a rap sheet as long as his arm regarding other charges the law wanted to nab him on. So he was living in hiding, the thief I mean. Why someone like that would steal an item so obvious to spot is beyond me. But when he saw the news story regarding the theft, he got afraid that his cover might be blown and, not wanting the law to come after him, he smashed the bicycle, dumped it somewhere where it would be found, and then fled out of state….

So Carl was out a very unique, very expensive steampunk-themed bicycle. And we were all bummed about this. Well, Carl put out a fundraiser to get him a new penny farthing, and the fundraiser, I’m pleased to say, was successful. He needed about $2000 for a new one, his fundraiser garnered $3,000. Karl will have a new bike, and he’ll likely ride it around at the Steampunk Picnic this year.

So, a happy ending to that particular thievery story. We love our friends at the Milwaukee Steampunk Society.

Fox6Now interviewed victim Carl Klinger about the crime: “West Allis high-wheel bike found damaged; Oklahoma man arrested”.

A unique bike stolen from outside a West Allis bar was recently found – badly damaged.

Video captures a guy nabbing it, crashing it and running away with it.

“It’s absolutely not rideable,” said Carl Klinger, the bike theft victim. “It’s not even fixable.”

Those words were not what Klinger expected to hear when West Allis police found his treasured bike.

“When I got there, it was just laying on the ground and it was just completely demolished,” he said.

The unique, old-time high-wheel bike was stolen more than two weeks ago as it was parked outside of a bar. Police knew who they were looking for after seeing surveillance video.

Wesley Yoakum was found more than 600 miles away, in Newton County, Missouri.

…Nearly every part of the bike was damaged. The seat was torn off, the tire bent, even the stitches were torn out of the tool case.

His friends have started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new bike so he can get back to riding again…

(6) ORYCON 44. [Item by Michael Pinnick.] Orycon 44 is being held October 18-20 this year at the DoubleTree Hotel Portland. Orycon is Oregon’s oldest literary and creative science fiction convention. Our Writer GoH is David D. Levine, our Artist GoH is Jennie Breeden, and our Media GoH is Victoria Price. Website: https://orycontemp.tezhme.net/

Writer GoH David D. Levine; Artist GoH Jennie Breeden; Media GoH Victoria Price.

(7) ELIZABETH BEAR Q&A. Long Lost Friends has a two-part interview with author Elizabeth Bear.

(8) …THE MORE THINGS STAY THE SAME. The Guardian’s Keza MacDonald notes “The disturbing online misogyny of Gamergate has returned – if it ever went away”.

…This reactionary under layer of gaming’s enthusiast media, which makes its home mostly on X and YouTube, does not actually have the slightest impact on how games are made, or indeed which games are made. Look at Gamergate: what did it actually achieve? Games are more diverse than they were 10 years ago, not less; I saw more non-white male faces and characters in this year’s spate of Summer Game Fest trailers and demos than at any previous time in the almost 20 years I’ve been covering games. But they can still make people’s online lives hell for a while. I know this because I’ve been through it, several times.

I was running the UK branch of Kotaku when Gamergate kicked off, and so I had a front-row seat for their harassment tactics, which included sending the most disgusting threats imaginable through all the online channels available to them, trying to get me fired by emailing game publishers and my bosses with dossiers of my professional misdeeds and journalistic failings (read: writing about video games from a feminist perspective), searching for my and my colleagues’ real addresses and phone numbers and family members (and posting those details to their subreddits if they found them), and putting together unhinged Google Docs with links drawn between “SJW” journalists and developers. One of these mad documents appeared briefly in a recent Netflix documentary about 4chan, prompting several of my friends to text me a screenshot asking me if I knew that I was a figure in old “alt-right” conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, yes, I did.

It’s happened again a few times since, for various reasons. Unfortunately, dealing with online mobs is a part of the job for many journalists and indeed game developers these days, and despite all the shit I’ve dealt with over the years as a woman covering video games, I’m still rather glad I don’t write about politics. But I know exactly how awful it can feel when they mobilise against you, especially if it’s the first time. They’ll search for whatever they think is the least flattering image of you on Google Images, use it as a cutout for a YouTube thumbnail image, and then rant for 10 minutes over screenshots of your articles. They’ll tweet prominent people in games, trying to get them to publicly discredit you. They’ll set their followers on you. It’s hard not to meet their manufactured rage with a lot of genuine rage of your own.

It’s tempting to dunk on these people endlessly, but outrage fuels outrage – especially now, when there is literal money to be made posting inflammatory nonsense on X or YouTube. If Gamergate proved anything, it’s that nobody has to pander to rage-baiting toxic gamers, or even listen to them. That said, I still don’t think there’s been enough public pushback against this flavour of online abuse from the biggest publishers in games over the past few months, when the consultancies they work with, the journalists and critics who cover them, and even some of their own developers have been caught in an online shitstorm. Take it from me: vocal support means a lot….

(9) MEMORY LANE.

[Compiled by Paul Weimer.]

June 19, 1946 — Salman Rushdie, 78.

By Paul Weimer: It was senior year in high school that I first heard of Salman Rushdie, and yes, it was the fatwa issued against him for The Satanic Verses.  As a result, he first came onto my radar, but I didn’t pick up a copy at that point.  Coming from a conservative family, even with all the SF I had read to that point, a book named “The Satanic Verses” would be a bridge too far.  I already had had to deal with my mother coming to terms with Dungeons and Dragons.  But one day, after Chemistry class, I noticed my teacher was in fact, reading the book.  I asked him about it, asked him what it was like, and if it was any good.  (This was also the conversation where I learned that ennui was not pronounced en-you-eye, although my teacher thought I was just messing with him). In any event, I waited for the book to hit paperback, by which time I was commuting to Brooklyn College, and so I could read it on the subway in surety and safety.  

Salman Rushdie in 2023.

The Satanic Verses, brilliant, strong and vibrant, was probably my first real contact with magic realism and was perhaps the most “literary” novel I attempted reading that wasn’t assigned in school. I am pretty sure that 19-year-old me didn’t grok the half of the book. Or maybe even that much. But it stunned me all the same. 

In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed a number of other works of his, particularly in audio (a couple of them read by Rushdie himself), like Midnight’s Children, The Enchantress of Florence, The Ground Beneath her Feet, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In all of this and throughout all of these books, including The Satanic Verses, there is a strong and abiding interest in the nature and the use of stories. I know there is plenty to untangle in terms of immigration, East-West Relations, history, mythology, and faith. Salman Rushdie’s work is a seemingly bottomless well for exploring and investigating these themes. 

Does he consider himself a SFF writer? I’m not sure, but if he isn’t, he has a house on the borderlands, ready to provoke and evoke thought in readers.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

(11) DC’S UNEXPECTED TEAM-UP. “Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman Unite with Bugs Bunny in MultiVersus” at CBR.com.

Covers for DC’s MultiVersus: Collision Detected were revealed in DC’s Sept. 2024 solicitations, ahead of the story’s release and show DC’s holy trinity paired up with a variety of MultiVersus characters from franchises that include Adventure Time, Steven Universe, Scooby-Doo and more….

…DC’s full description of MultiVersus: Collision Detected reads: “Bruce Wayne, Diana Prince, and Clark Kent each wake in a cold sweat, troubled by strange dreams they’ve had about ‘the rabbit,’ ‘the star child,’ and ‘the witch.’ Their investigation into these enigmatic visions brings them to unexpected locales and unusual characters, but none more unusual than the mysterious “rabbit” from their dreams as they find themselves face-to-face with the one and only Bugs Bunny. What the heck is going on here? And who in the name of the Multiverse are ‘the star child’ and ‘the witch’? The hit video game spills from your screen and into the DCU, and it’s bringing a whole lot of friends from some of your favorite universes with it!”

(12) NOT IN OUR FUTURE AFTER ALL. The New Yorker is proud to share “Six Eerie Predictions That Early Sci-Fi Authors Got Completely Wrong”.

Since the genre’s inception, science-fiction writers have imagined what the future might hold for Earth and beyond. While their stories are often fantastical, many of them anticipated technologies that actually exist today, such as television and artificial intelligence. However, countless more made predictions that were absolute whiffs.

Here’s the first of their half-dozen duds.

1. Nuclear-Powered Soap Dispenser

While many sci-fi authors envisioned the possibilities of nuclear power, Philip K. Dick’s “The Land That Time Remembered” got specifically stuck on the idea of a society where humans washed their hands with “soap dispensers powered by the almighty atom,” and where “torrents of soap spurted forth by means of the forces that birthed the universe.”

(13) DISCWORLD JIGSAW PUZZLE COMING. Paul Kidby’s character art in the form of a puzzle is available for preorder. “The World of Terry Pratchett: A 1000-Piece Discworld Jigsaw Puzzle by Paul Kidby”.

This stunning jigsaw puzzle features glorious artwork from Paul Kidby, Sir Terry Pratchett’s artist of choice, depicting all the favourite Discworld characters. Paul Kidby provided the illustrations for The Last Hero, designed the covers for the Discworld novels since 2002, and is the author of the bestselling The Art of Discworld. This expanded artwork is available for the first time in jigsaw puzzle format in a deluxe gift box with an accompanying booklet identifying each of the characters along with quotes, trivia and more.

(14) MCDONALD’S KILLING AI DRIVE-THROUGH. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] Let’s just hope that the AI doesn’t try to kill McDonald’s back. Or worse, take it out on us.

Anyway, you’re not free and clear yet. McDonald’s makes it clear they’re going to try again later, apparently hoping the technology will improve enough to not dish out ice cream cones with bacon on top. (Wait! Where’s the problem there?)  “McDonald’s kills AI drive-thru ordering after mistakes” at Axios.

Friction point: Customers had reported a slew of AI ordering blunders.

One posted video of the system incorrectly believing she’d ordered hundreds of dollars of chicken McNuggets, the Today Show reported.

In another case, a customer was given an ice cream cone topped with bacon, the New York Post reported….

(15) IRRESISTIBLE: YES, NO? “Doctor Who ‘Pyramids of Mars’ 5″ Action Figure Box Set” from Oriental Trading.

Recreate the classic Doctor Who adventure “Pyramids of Mars” from 1975 featuring the Fourth Doctor! This Doctor Who Pyramids of Mars Priory Collector’s Playset features an opening and closing pyramid along with detailed set pieces like a Sarcophagus and Egyptian urns. Complete with 5-inch scale action figures of Sutekh and Marcus Scarman, you’ll be able to make your very own adventure with the Pyramids of Mars!

(16) RED PLANET, GREEN AURORAS. From Smithsonian Magazine we learn, “Mars Was Hit With a Solar Storm Days After Earth’s Aurora Light Show, NASA Says”.

Days after solar storms spurred widespread sightings of auroras across Earth in early May, a new bout of eruptions on the sun brought glowing skies to another planet: Mars.

From pole to pole, Mars was hit by a barrage of gamma rays and X-rays, followed by charged particles from a coronal mass ejection. These led to auroras that would have appeared, if any viewers were on its surface, as a deep green color, reports the New York Times’ Robin George Andrews.

(17) VIDEO OF THE DAY. The latest Pitch Meeting is Superman (1978), for some reason.

[Thanks to Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Paul Weimer, Scott Edelman, Daniel Dern, Michael Pinnick, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Teddy Harvia for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Mark and Ellen.]

Pixel Scroll 5/11/24 I’m Still Scrolling After All This Time, Picking Up The Pixels Of My Life Without You In My File

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(1) SCAM TARGETING WESTERN AUTHORS PURPORTS TO BE FROM SCIENCE FICTION WORLD. [Item by Ersatz Culture.] On Saturday May 11th, the Weibo account of Science Fiction World magazine issued a statement about fraudulent emails addressed to authors.  The emails claimed that SFW had decided to no longer publish work by the author that had previously been acquired, but would retain the copyright, and offered the author the chance to pay to reclaim their copyright.  The post did include an image showing part of the (English language) email that one affected author did receive, but redacted their name.  A Weibo post a day or so earlier identified at least one such affected author, but at time of writing, that author hasn’t posted about it on Twitter or Bluesky, so I’ve not included their name here.

A Google Translate rendition of the statement, with minor manual edits, follows.

Dear readers, authors and partners,

Recently, we have received feedback from foreign science fiction writers that we work with. Some criminals are using impersonation techniques to launch carefully planned email fraud incidents targeting those foreign writers.

This fraudulent email uses the email address “translations@sfw-international.com“, purporting to be from an editor at our company.  It falsely informs the author that their work will not be published due to so-called “commercial evaluation” or other reasons, and illegally claims to retain the copyright of the author’s work, proposing that the author should pay a fee to redeem their copyright.

We strongly condemn such illegal behavior and have taken corresponding measures to cooperate with law enforcement agencies and actively investigate the matter.  In order to protect the rights and interests of all authors, readers and partners, we hereby issue the following anti-fraud guidelines. Please be vigilant and jointly prevent such fraud as follows:

1. Get confirmation through official channels: Our company will formally notify you through official channels (the official contact channels are indicated on the copyright pages of “Science Fiction World” and its journals) for any decisions regarding the publication status of the work, copyright transfer, or financial transactions. . When receiving similar emails, please do not reply directly to the email, but verify through official channels.

2. Be wary of fake email addresses: Scammers often use addresses that are very similar to official email addresses to send emails.  When receiving similar emails, please carefully check the sender’s email address and pay attention to identifying subtle differences, such as adding or replacing characters, using different top-level domain names, etc.

3. Understand the formal processes: Our company has complete and strict business processes. For major matters such as copyright and contract changes, our company will implement a strict and formal process and will never make a hasty decision through just one email.

4. Direct communication verification: If you receive such an email, the most direct and effective way is to contact us through the official contact method you know to verify the situation. Never use the contact number or return address provided in the email for verification.

5. Improve information security awareness: Keep personal information and communications safe, and do not click on unknown links or attachments in emails to prevent personal information from being leaked or being attacked by malware.

We are fully aware of the importance of each author’s work and the hard work behind it.

We will fight resolutely to the end against any behavior that undermines the rights of authors. At the same time, we also encourage authors or other individuals who receive similar emails to report them to us and local law enforcement agencies in a timely manner, so as to jointly maintain a good creative and publishing environment.

Here, we reiterate our commitment to all partners: we will continue to strengthen information security protection and ensure that the rights and interests of every author who works with us are respected and protected to the greatest extent. The general public is requested to remain vigilant and work together to build a safe space for literary exchange.

Science Fiction World Magazine. May 11, 2024

(2)  PTERRY SURPRISE. The Terry Pratchett website has announced “Another lost Terry Pratchett story found”.

We are pleased (delighted, ecstatic) to announce that one further lost story by Terry Pratchett has been found.

A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories, published in 2023, collected 20 rediscovered tales from when Terry wrote under a pseudonym back in the 1970s and 1980s. It was, at the time, believed to be the last stories of his. But, we were wrong.

One final published tale has been found, that was missed from this collection: Arnold, the Bominable Snowman, which brings us to some more news.

This new story will appear in the paperback edition of A Stroke of the Pen, which will publish in September 2024. Furthermore, the story itself will be published online – for free – by Penguin Books, so that those who bought the hardback do not miss out on this tale. More information on the paperback edition, and where to read the story online, will be made available at a later date….

(3) FANFICTION GOT THERE FIRST. In case you thought the title sounded familiar, The Hollywood Reporter says there’s a reason: “’The Hunt for Gollum’ LOTR Movie Already Exists”. And for a moment, Warner Bros.’ lawyers were trying to pitch the video into Mount Doom.

If Warner Bros.’ newly announced The Lord of the Rings movie idea The Hunt for Gollum sounded a bit like fan fiction, that’s because it already is.

There’s a 2009 fan-made film titled The Hunt for Gollum that you can watch below. The film, directed by Chris Bouchard, is rather ambitious. The Hunt for Gollum spans 39 minutes and has received plenty of praise from fans upon its release.

Following WB’s announcement, the film was taken offline for many hours and YouTube put up a notice saying Warner Bros. had filed a copyright claim against the fan movie and blocked it. LOTR fans reacted quite negatively to the takedown online and, early Friday, the film was restored to YouTube….

The fan-made Hunt for Gollum is set during opening act of The Fellowship of the Ring and fills in a quest that was only briefly discussed in Jackson’s 2001 film: Gandalf (played by Patrick O’Connor in the short) meets with Aragorn (Adrian Webster) and asks him to hunt for Gollum to find out more about Frodo’s magic ring. Aragorn has a series of adventures, traps and loses Gollum and gets attacked by orcs and Ringwraiths. Gollum is recaptured by the Elves of Mirkwood, and he’s interrogated by Gandalf….

With my terrible hearing I can’t say whether the audio is in English – but the closed captioning is in Spanish.

(4) SPFBOX. Mark Lawrence’s tenth Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (“SPFBOX”) immediately filled its 300-entry quota on May 10 and has moved on to “SPFBOX phase 1”.

This is the VERY prelimary allocation of books to blogs.

What now follows will be swapping from blog to blog for books that meet the contest rules but have authors who are friends with someone in the blog they’ve been allocated to.

And elimination of books that don’t meet the rules, followed by their replacement with books that didn’t get selected in the original 300.

(5) FRANCHISE COLLISION. A reference to the latest episode of Doctor Who. A spoiler? I never know. “Could the 2 Oldest Sci-Fi Shows Finally Cross Over?” at Inverse.

In “Space Babies,” the debut episode of the newly relaunched 2024 Doctor Who “Season 1” (or Season 14, or Season 40, depending on how you count) the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) have a quick discussion about how beaming works in the universe of Star Trek. When the Doctor makes one small quip, fans of both venerable sci-fi franchises might wonder if travel between the Final Frontier and the Whoinverse, is, indeed possible in some kind of mega-geek-multiverse….

At the start of “Space Babies,” Ruby asks the Doctor if they were just beamed somewhere, saying “Is that like a matter transporter? Like in Star Trek?” The Doctor grins broadly and says, “We gotta visit them one day.” This is not the first time Doctor Who has referenced Star Trek (or that Trek has referenced Who) but, it does seem to be the biggest indication to date — at least on screen — that the canon of Trek could exist in an adjacent dimension, rather than just as fiction.

Throughout all of post-2005 Doctor Who, there have been multiple references to characters and ideas from the Star Trek franchise. Rose called the 9th Doctor “Spock,” in the Season 1 episode “The Empty Child,” the 10th Doctor flashed the Vulcan “live long and prosper” hand symbol in the Season 2 episode “Fear Her,” while the 12th Doctor evoked the famous opening lines “Space… the final frontier,” in the Season 10 episode “Oxygen.” And that’s just a small sampling of Trek Easter eggs in Who!

(6) CHALLENGING HERSELF. “Brush and Ink” at Colleen Doran’s Funny Business, is illustrated with examples based on Gaiman’s Sandman series.

I used to get a lot of ribbing for having an elaborate, decorative style. The word was, artists who choose to add decoration and complex rendering are probably hiding drawing deficiencies.

While I agree that this is sometimes the case (and I can think of a few artists who make my hair go the wrong way with endless rendering and very weak underdrawing,) not all of us are covering up poor structure with frou frou.

I always start with a simple, solid drawing before adding the stylization. If the drawing isn’t solid, I don’t proceed until it is.

Awhile ago I decided to challenge my skill set with a series of minimalist brush and ink pieces. I limited the time cost of each drawing to 10 minutes or less. And I tried to stick to no underdrawing, if possible.

That is, one and done, no prelim. Ink only, nothing else.

While I’ve shown some of these drawings before, you folks on Substack probably haven’t seen most of them.

Most of the original exploratory sketches were based on characters from Neil Gaiman’s SANDMAN series, like this group of sketches of Death….

Nicki Lynch, left, and Sheila Strickland, right, at the Southern Fandom Press Alliance party during Worldcon 76 in San Jose. Photo by Kay McCutcheon.

(7) R.I.P. SHEILA STRICKLAND. Longtime File 770 subscriber Sheila Strickland died May 9. The Louisiana fan said in her zine for the Southern Fandom Press Alliance a few months back that her doctors had detected cancer and it had spread to her intestine and liver. She went into hospice just a few days ago. Rich Lynch says, “She was a great lady, always looking toward the future.  And now she’s very much missed.”

Guy H. Lillian III says Sheila’s sister told her Facebook friends that the family obituary will be in the New Orleans Advocate this week and the funeral on May 16 at the Greenoaks Funeral Home and Memorial Park in Baton Rouge at noon.

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born May 11, 1918 — Richard P. Feynman. (Died 1988.) I’ll admit that I don’t begin to understand what most of the work Richard P. Feynman did as a theoretical physicist. I seriously doubt most of you do. 

While at Princeton, Feynman was recruited for the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project, the very, very secret U.S. Army laboratory set up in Los Alamos, for the purpose of developing the atomic bomb. He was present at the first detonation of an atomic bomb.

Richard P. Feynman. (Caltech Archives)

In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. The three each created new mathematical tools for a theory called quantum electrodynamics, which describes how subatomic particles interact with light. 

Now there is the matter his influence on the genre. Although as I said was his work in theoretical physics, Feynman was largely pioneered the field of quantum computing and was solely responsible for the concept of nanotechnology. So yes, two widely used SF concepts are from him. 

By the late Fifties, he was already popularizing his love of physics through books and lectures including lectures  on nanotechnology called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and a multi volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Yes, these are available from the usual suspects. 

He also became known through his autobiographical works Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?. Naturally there would be books written about him. The biography by James Gleick,  Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman is the one I’ll single out as being the best.

It’s worth noting last is that he was selected to be a member the Presidential Rogers Commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. 

Lis notes that during the Challenger explosion hearings, Feynman  demonstrated on camera that an O-ring dropped into ice water lost all the resilience critical to its function on the shuttle solid rocket fuel tanks. 

(9) ROBERT BLOCH WEBSITE UPDATE. Eight vintage photos of Robert Bloch with such friends/family as Bob Tucker, Dean A. Grennell, Fritz Leiber, Marion Bloch, and others have been added to the RobertBloch.net gallery.

(10) UNEXPECTED NETWORKING. At GamesRadar+, “Russell T Davies explains how his ‘accidental’ criticism of Loki led to the Marvel show’s director writing a Doctor Who episode”.

…As reported by Uproxx, during a virtual Pride month panel at Swansea University, Davies described the queer representation in the MCU show [Loki] as being a “feeble gesture”. As you may recall, Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief became the first openly queer lead character in MCU canon thanks to a reference to the character’s love life in the first season, but at the time Davies wasn’t impressed by the inclusion: “Loki makes one reference to being bisexual once, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh my god, it’s like a pansexual show.’ It’s like one word. He said the word ‘prince’ and we’re meant to go, ‘Thank you, Disney! Aren’t you marvelous?’ It’s a ridiculous, craven, feeble gesture towards the vital politics and the stories that should be told.”

…Reflecting on that statement now, Davies admits that his comments were a mistake, explaining that he reached out to Herron immediately to apologize. Little did he know that they would continue chatting, striking up a friendship, which would then result in working together on Doctor Who….

… For the upcoming season, Herron and her co-writer Briony Redman have penned episode 6 which is titled ‘Rogue’. Of course, since the Doctor Who team like to keep their cards close to their chests, little has been revealed about the episode, but we do know that it is set in the Regency era and will feature Mindhunter star Jonathan Groff.

(11) A PROBLEMATIC PIXIE? According to The Street’s report “Disney World cuts classic character from meet-and-greets amid scrutiny” it appears that Disney has permanently discontinued “meet and greet” sessions for Tinkerbell at almost all of their attractions. 

This action followed the New York Times’ 2022 article “Disney, Built on Fairy Tales and Fantasy, Confronts the Real World” which said the company’s Disney Stories Matter team “was marked for caution because she is ‘body conscious’ and jealous of Peter Pan’s attention, according to the executives…”

The Street’s May 7 report says:

…[The] Disney’s Stories Matter team was developed to spot and correct “negative depictions of people and cultures” in Disney’s products.

“We are reviewing our offerings beyond the screen, which include products, books, music and experiences,” reads the Stories Matter homepage on Disney’s website. “While advisories for negative depictions of people and cultures may be added to some offerings, others will be reimagined. We are also investing in new ways to better reflect the rich diversity of stories in our world. This work is ongoing and will evolve as we strive toward a more inclusive tomorrow.”…

The PlanDisney website, answering the question “Why does Tinkerbell no longer have a meet and greet and are their plans to bring her back?” says that currently the only location where Tink does meet visitors is at Pixie Hollow at the Disneyland Resort in California.

(12) MINNESOTA’S NEW FLAG. AP News is there as “Minnesota unfurls new state flag atop the capitol for the first time”. However, my real reason for running this story is that it was the first time I heard about the famed losing entry featuring a loon with lasers for eyes.

Minnesota officially unfurled its new state flag atop the capitol for the first time Saturday on statehood day.

The new flag and accompanying state seal were adopted to replace an old design that Native Americans said reminded them of painful memories of conquest and displacement.

The new symbols eliminate an old state seal that featured the image of a Native American riding off into the sunset while a white settler plows his field with a rifle at the ready. The seal was a key feature of the old flag. That’s why there was pressure to change both.

Officials didn’t pick any of the most popular designs submitted online that included options like a loon — the state bird — with lasers for eyes….

The new flag
The loon with lasers for eyes

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Ersatz Culture, Lise Andreasen, Danny Sichel, Rich Lynch, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kaboobie.]

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(1) NO, NO, NOT ROGOV! Annalee Newitz calls Paul Linebarger (aka Cordwainer Smith) “The Sci-Fi Writer Who Invented Conspiracy Theory” in The Atlantic.

…Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction—and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.

I pored over Linebarger’s personal papers at the Hoover Institution propaganda collection while researching my forthcoming book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Boxes of his studies on the politics of China and Southeast Asia are filed alongside his fiction manuscripts and unpublished musings on psychology. Here, I realized, was an origin story for modern conspiracy politics, which blur the line between sci-fi plots and American patriotism—they came from a psywar operative. Put another way, an agent of what some would now call the “deep state” had devised the far-out stories that politicians like Greene use to condemn it. Perhaps, if she and others knew this, they might not be so eager to blame space lasers and vaccine microchips for what ails our nation….

(2) WESTERCON 76 UTAH HOTEL RESERVATIONS OPEN. [Item by Kevin Standlee.] Westercon 76 has updated their hotel/venue web page with their hotel booking information. I published a post on the Westercon.org site about it{ “Westercon 76 Utah Opens Hotel Reservations”.

The short version is “use the link on the convention hotel/venue page” or “use group code WET when booking through Hilton.com.  

(3) MAKING BOOK. These suspects are from the nation, not the U.S. state — “Georgians arrested over cross-Europe thefts of rare library books”. The Guardian tells how the crime was committed.

Police have arrested nine Georgians suspected of running a sophisticated criminal operation stealing valuable antique books – including an original Alexander Pushkin manuscript – from national libraries across Europe.

Shelves of 19th-century Russian-language literature had been ransacked over two years across several countries and replaced with fakes, Europol, the EU police agency, revealed on Thursday.

The University of Warsaw, which was among the targets, last year reported the theft of first editions of works by the influential authors Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol.

Europol said the suspects allegedly sometimes posed as academics to gain access to the books in order to make counterfeits of “outstanding quality”.

While in the reading rooms “they would meticulously measure the books and take photographs before handing them back” – only to return days, weeks or months later to swap them with near perfect copies.

In other cases they “relied on a more crude approach” and simply staked out the collection in national libraries, decided what was of interest and later broke in and stole the books, police said….

(4) MARK D. BRIGHT (1955-2024). Black comics creator Mark D. Bright died March 27. The Comics Journal’s in-depth tribute begins:

Issue #257 of DC’s House of Mystery wasn’t short on talent when it hit the stands in late 1977. Like all issues of that horror anthology, it had its fair share of clunkers, but you couldn’t fault the art team. Joe Orlando (on the cover), Ernie Chan, Michael Golden, Arthur Suydam… and in between these heavy hitters was a three-pager by a newcomer named Mark D. Bright, raised in Montclair, NJ, and not yet a graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He would have other names in credit boxes throughout the years: M.D. Bright, “Doc” Bright, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Bright would go on to a long and storied career, doing well-regarded work for both Marvel and DC throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He was also the co-creator of Icon with Dwayne McDuffie, one of the cornerstones of Milestone Comics, and co-creator of the oddball superhero comedy series Quantum and Woody with frequent collaborator Christopher Priest. Bright passed away on March 27, 2024, leaving the world of comics a much poorer place….

(5) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

Born April 28, 1948 — Terry Pratchett. (Died 2015.)

By Paul Weimer: It took a second bite at the apple for me to fall for the works of Terry Pratchett.  My first attempt was in the 90’s, when I had vaguely heard about his work, and picked up The Color/Colour of Magic.  I thought it was fine and I also tried the Light Fantastic and Sourcery.  But it really didn’t gel for me. I thought at the time Pratchett was an okay writer, and maybe the humor wasn’t quite what I was looking for in fantasy at the time.  (To be fair, the humor in those early Discworld novels is a lot broader than the later more refined ones). 

Terry Pratchett in 2011.

It took over a decade and my late friend Scott to get me to try Pratchett again.  Scott was passionate about a number of writers. Zelazny, which we had in common. Lois M. Bujold, which we also had in common. Michael Scott Rohan. And Terry Pratchett.  Scott encouraged me and “talked me through” finding where I would best enjoy Pratchett’s oeuvre.  I found an affinity for Pyramids (and the best Mathematician on all of Discworld), but when it came to The Night Watch, I really started understanding the Discworld Project and what it was doing.  From then on, Pratchett was on auto-buy.  Vimes and company remained my favorite, although The Librarian is probably my single favorite minor character, if only for the fantastic idea of L-Space. 

Beyond Discworld, there is also Good Omens of course, and also the Long Earth series. The latter feels a lot more the work of his co-author Stephen Baxter than Pratchett but there are moments, scenes, images where the utter magic of Terry Pratchett’s work and writing and humanism comes through. 

One of my not-in-a-Pratchett bits that involves Pratchett is a bit in the late Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. In that novel, in its (now a) alternate history, Pratchett went on to write many many more Discworld novels, and became so popular that people would use VR to cosplay as being from the new area of the Discworld these imaginary novels were set (basically an entrepot more along the lines of Alexandria, Egypt).  I could wish, Zelazny style, to walk into that world and bring home copies of those “lost” Pratchett novels. I would love to read them. 

And, sadly I never got to meet him in person. My loss. 

Happy birthday.

(6) COMICS SECTION.

  • Off the Mark agrees that there’s always leftovers.
  • Bizarro takes us inside a reactive museum.

(7) DOUBLE FEATURE. The Flights of Fantasy Film Festival will show The War of The Worlds (1953 — 4K Restoration) and ten of the Best George Pal Oscar-Winning Puppetoons (restored in Technicolor®) at the Historic 1931 Regency Westwood Theater in LA on Wednesday, May 22 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets at the link.

Scheduled to appear are special guests director Joe Dante (Gremlins), Ann Robinson (star of War of the Worlds), and director-producer Arnold Leibovit (The Puppetoon Movie, The Time Machine 2002). These distinguished guests will offer their unique perspectives and insights, sharing behind-the-scenes stories and discussing the lasting impact of George Pal’s work on the world of cinema. Maxwell DeMille (master of ceremonies) is a prominent figure in reviving old Hollywood glamour through vintage-themed events. His commitment to authenticity has made him a leading figure in the vintage entertainment scene, and he also hosts film screenings and lectures on classic Hollywood culture.

(8) PRODUCTS LAUNCH. Gizmodo promises “Lego’s Gorgeous New Space Sets Shoot You Into the Stars”.

…This morning Lego revealed two more entries in its 2024 campaign to bring the ethos of its classic space sets across its various lines: for Lego Art, there’s a beautiful, buildable recreation of the Milky Way, containing 3,091 pieces for you to build into a technicolor spiral galaxy and hang on your wall. For those looking for something a little less macro-scaled, but still high on detail, the new 3,601-piece Artemis Launch System, part of the Lego Icons series, includes a mobile launch tower, a rocket support and crew bridge, and then of course a multistage rocket, complete with 2 solid-fuel boosters. The model also even includes a small brick-built recreation of the ESA Orion spacecraft, which can be put into the rocket or as part of a separate display stand, highlighting Artemis’ mission to further explore the Moon….

See photo galleries of both at the Lego website:

(9) METAL DETECTIVE. “Spacecraft approaches metal object zooming around Earth, snaps footage” – at Mashable.

A spacecraft has carefully approached and imaged a large hunk of metal orbiting Earth — a step in tackling humanity’s mounting space junk woes.

The delicate space mission, undertaken by the Japanese satellite technology company Astroscale, used its ADRAS-J satellite to travel within several hundred meters of an abandoned section of a noncommunicative, derelict rocket, proving it could safely observe in such close proximity…

(10) PIGS NOT QUITE IN SPACE. William Shatner has taken this flight before – a clip from a 1996 Muppets Tonight episode. Watch it on YouTube.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Jeffrey Smith, Kevin Standlee, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, Kathy Sullivan, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jayn.]

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(1) OOKPIK FIXED. Terry Fong, chair of the Montréal in 2027 Worldcon bid, sent an official reply to a question from File 770 about the $350 level presupport.

We goofed on the wording of one of our membership presupport levels. The description of our highest level (Ookpik) now reads as follow:

“We will pay your Advance WSFS membership (voting fee) in the 2027 Site Selection election. You still will have to join the 2025 Worldcon as at least a WSFS (supporting) member in order to vote on the 2027 Site Selection. (Of course, you have to cast your own ballot.) If we win, you will get a full attending membership including a WSFS membership. All the perks of lower support levels, a piece of nifty swag from a previous CANSMOF-sponsored convention AND a fridge magnet.  You also get a unique nifty cool ribbon for your support at this level.”

Apologies to all for any confusion arising from our previous wording.

(2) HEAR TERRY PRATCHETT. Fanac.org has added an audio recording of Terry Pratchett’s GoH speech from Noreascon 4 (2004).  

It’s very, very, funny. The recording is about 1 hr, 10 minutes long. It does not include all the Q&A. Audio provided by Steven Silver. Thanks, Steven! Portrait of Terry Pratchett by Charles Williams, from the N4 Program Book.

Noreascon 4 Program Book art by Charles Williams

(3) NERD LOVE. [Item by Daniel Dern.] From the New York Times: “Who Kissed First? Archaeology Has an Answer”.

This is a love story:…

They met a week earlier at a pub near the University of Copenhagen, where both were undergraduates. “I had asked my cousin if he knew any nice single guys with long hair and long beards,” Dr. Rasmussen said. “And he said, ‘Sure, I’ll introduce you to one.’”

Dr. Arboll, in turn, had been looking for a partner that shared his interest in Assyriology, the study of Mesopotamian languages and the sources written in them. “Not many people know what an Assyriologist actually does,” he told her.

“I do,” said Dr. Rasmussen, who had taken some of the same classes.

Dr. Arboll, now a professor of Assyriology at the university, said, “When I heard that, I knew she was a keeper.” …

(4) NOW, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T PANIC! [Item by SF Concatenaton’s Jonathan Cowie.] Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) was the subject of the last third of this week’s BBC Radio 4 show A Good Read.

Now, I came to Hitch-Hiker’s in its original incarnation as the 1978 BBC 4 Radio show the last two episodes of which greatly benefited from some cohesiveness from John Lloyd. That season and the subsequent ‘Christmas edition’ (which became the first episode of the second season) is for me what Hitch-Hiker’s is all about: to me, you can keep the subsequent series; the fist season and Christmas episode alone were works of true genius).

I was not alone, Hitch-Hiker’s was a favourite with almost all to my fellow members of my college SF group, Hatfield PSIFA (now Hertfordshire University PSIFA). And even then we were not alone.  I remember at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton, Britain, when the Hugo Award short-list for ‘Best Dramatic Presentation’ was read out there was a huge cheer from the audience.  As it happened, the film Superman won and Kal El himself in the mortal guise of Christopher Reeve (not Clark Kent) took to the stage. He, very graciously, said while he was happy that technically Superman had won that clearly for the people there in the hall it was Hitch-Hiker’s that was the true winner… (You have to remember that, back in the 1970s, N. America dominated the Worldcon and Hugos far more than they do today.)

Which brings us to this week’s BBC Radio 4 A Good Read.  The presenter noted that though the novel (1979) came out some 45 years ago, Hitch-Hiker’s had never been a subject on that programme!  It has to be said that the novel did not get an entirely smooth ride as one of the show’s panelists did not like SF and another took a more of a curate’s egg approach.  All this despite the presenter noting that 15 million copies of the book had been sold among other related adaptations to other media and merch.  Nonetheless, some interesting points were made including that the character Zaphod Beeblebrox was a politician who actually never did run anything but was a self-serving, self publicist… It was noted that here there are parallels with some of today’s politicians (examples, it was hinted, including in the UK and elsewhere (the US?), who could she have meant?).

“Harriett’s choice is Douglas Adams’ story about Arthur Dent’s journey through space with an alien called Ford Prefect after earth is demolished to make way for a bypass.”

You can access this episode of A Good Read at the link. Remember to skip to the programme’s final third. (Phew. Now, where’s my towel?)

(5) COURT TOSSES FOUR CLAIMS IN SUIT AGAINST OPEN AI. “Court Trims Authors’ Copyright Lawsuit Against Open AI” – Publishers Weekly knows where it was clipped.

A federal judge in California this week dismissed four of six claims made by authors in a now consolidated lawsuit alleging that Open AI infringes their copyrights. But the court gave the authors a month to amend their complaint, and the suit’s core claim of direct infringement—which Open AI did not seek to dismiss—remains active.

Following a December 7 hearing, federal judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín needed just 13 pages to dismiss a host of claims made by the authors, including vicarious infringement (count two), claims that Open AI removed or altered copyright management information (count three); negligence under the unfair competition law (count five); and unjust enrichment (count six). The court allowed a fourth claim of “unfairness” under the unfair competition law to proceed, however, holding that, if true, the authors’ claims that Open AI used their copyrighted works “to train their language models for commercial profit may constitute an unfair practice.”….

Amazing Stories has a more quotes from the decision in its post “Breaking: AI Copyright Infringement Claims Rejected”.

(6) THE ‘SHOW’ SHOULD GO ON. Philip Athans turns to an old paperback for an example of “What We Can Learn From A Random Science Fiction Novel: ‘Show’ Vs. Info Dump” at Fantasy Author’s Handbook.

…When I say “show, don’t tell,” the first thing I’m attacking is the info dump. This is when authors effectively stop the story and start explaining, when they start writing an article instead of a scene. I’ve called out one author on that here, so you can see an example of what not to do, but in reading—and loving—Star Bridge, when I got to Chapter 8, I found a fantastic example of how to balance showing a character’s experience of an imagined world while conveying, not dumping, all sorts of specific information about how that world operates.

In Star Bridge, authors Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn seems to have committed the cardinal sin of opening each and every chapter with what, on the surface, would appear to be short info dumps. Presented under the title THE HISTORY, we’re “told” a little about the unique future in which interstellar travel, via a teleportation device, is strictly controlled by Eron, a monopoly that has reached essentially imperial status. The story begins with our hero, Horn, having been sent to assassinate the leader of this monopoly. It’s a fun ride, and one that goes into deeper places as the story unfolds….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born February 14, 1970 — Simon Pegg, 54. Though Simon Pegg’s certainly not James Doohan, who’s beloved for being the first and for most Trekkies still the only  Montgomery “Scotty” Scott no doubt, I found his version in Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond to be quite true to the original character. Though it’s been eight years since the last film, they are talking apparently about a fourth film. 

(For the record, I thought the primary actors were fine in all three, but the scripts in the second two sucked. And the less said a certain recast villian from the original series, the better.)

Simon Pegg in 2016.

Paramount + has all of the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible films of which there are eight so far. Pegg is Benji Dunn, an IMF technician, who debuts in Mission: Impossible III as a supporting protagonist before returning in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and Part Two, no longer as a supporting cast member but as a leading cast member. 

So who’s seen some of these? Opinions please?

Now let’s deal with his non-franchise film roles. His first venture into the genre was Shaun of the Dead which he co-wrote with Edgar Wright and had an acting role in as, errr, Shaun. Of course he got, wait for it, the meaty role. You can groan now. 

It was inspired by ideas they used for their Spaced comedy series about two women living in a small but posh apartment, particularly an episode in which Pegg’s character hallucinates a zombie invasion. Though not SF, the fourteen episodes often made references to popular culture, including SF and horror films, comic books, and video games. 

At Romero’s invitation, Pegg and Wright made both cameo appearances in Romero’s Land of the Dead. Not meaty roles, but they are there. 

He appeared in a Ninth Doctor story, “the Long Game” as The Editor. The BBC press release for this episode says Pegg had grown up with Who and he considered it a “great honour” to guest star on the series, and he was rather pleased at being cast as a bad guy.

I’m going to note just several of the animated works he did. He did the voice and motion capture for detective Thompson in The Adventures of Tintin (also known, though I didn’t know this before as charmingly as The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn). And he did the voice of what sounds like a bad sneeze, Reepicheep the Mouse, in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Let’s end with Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, a curious film indeed. It is based on the legend of Gef an apparently talking mongoose , a story that got extensive coverage in the British tabloid press in the early 1930s. Pegg plays investigator Nandor Fodor, and Neil Gaiman voices Gef.  It left British critics terribly annoyed. Not that it takes much to annoy them, does it? 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • Eek! reveals the truth about a superhero’s laundry.
  • Speed Bump shows the last person on Earth learning the reason she’s still around.

(9) FANTASTIC CAST. Variety names names: “Fantastic Four: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn Cast at Marvel (variety.com)

The superhero quartet — the first characters created for Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby — will be played by Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards (aka Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm (aka the Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm (aka the Human Torch) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm (aka the Thing).

As part of the casting announcement, Disney has swapped the release dates of “The Fantastic Four” (now set for July 25, 2025) and “Thunderbolts” (now set for May 2, 2025). Those are two of four Marvel tentpoles currently set to open in 2025, along with “Captain America: Brave New World” in February and “Blade” in November. Four Marvel films are also scheduled for 2026, including “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.” That’s a ramp up from 2024: Marvel only has “Deadpool & Wolverine” for theaters, on July 26….

(Image courtesy of Marvel Studios)

(10) OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB. Inverse critic Hoai-Tran Bui declares that “Madame Web Is Embarrassing for Everyone Involved”.

… Madame Web isn’t so much a movie as it is the pretense of one — a collection of Easter eggs and prequel nonsense strung together by half-assed ADR and dialogue that feels like it was drummed up in Screenwriting 101. But the most alarming thing about Madame Web is that it is a movie that never really gets started. Instead, it’s just one long prelude to the actual story, like being trapped in one of Cassie Webb’s time-looping visions with no escape….

(11) REPO’D AGAIN. “Alex Cox Directing Kiowa Gordon in ‘Repo Man 2’” reports Variety.

Alex Cox is getting back behind the wheel.

The “Repo Man” director is revisiting the off-kilter world of extraterrestrials and car repossession that he mined so memorably in the 1984 cult classic in a new sequel that is being introduced to buyers at the Berlin Film Festival and European Film Market. Entitled “Repo Man 2: The Wages of Beer,” the film is being backed by Buffalo 8 Productions, a film and media company best known for the critically acclaimed work on Netflix series “The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.” Cox wrote the script along with directing the film.

Kiowa Gordon, best known for his role as Embry Call in “The Twilight Saga” and for his work in the AMC series “Dark Winds,” is set to lead the cast as Otto. Emilio Estevez played Otto in the 1984 original. The film picks up after Otto has boarded his trusty 1967 Chevy Malibu to journey across the infinities of time and space. In that time he has aged exactly 90 minutes. 

(12) FOR THOSE WITH YOUNGER DIGESTIVE TRACTS. “Mountain Dew pie and chocolate tacos revealed in Taco Bell showcase” reports Independent. See the hour-long event in this YouTube video: “Taco Bell Presents Live Más Live 2024”.

(13) THAT IS THE QUESTION. Revisit Sir Patrick Stewart’s visit to Sesame Street from many years ago: “Patrick Stewart Soliloquy on B”.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Daniel Dern, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Danny Sichel.]

Pixel Scroll 1/20/24 Are You There, Microcosmic God? It’s Margaret’s Mini-Me

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 (0) Today’s Scroll will be lean because I’ve spent my hours writing about the 2023 Hugo Award Stats Final report posted today on the official Hugo Awards website. My analysis is here: “2023 Hugo Nomination Report Has Unexplained Ineligibility Rulings; Also Reveals Who Declined”.

(2) NEIL GAIMAN. And here’s what he had to say on Bluesky about a couple of those ineligibility rulings.

(3) DIFFERENCE ENGINEER. [Item by Steven French.] “Play about computing pioneer Ada Lovelace wins Women’s prize for playwriting” reports the Guardian.

A play about the reincarnation of the Victorian computing pioneer Ada Lovelace has won this year’s Women’s prize for playwriting.

Intelligence, by Sarah Grochala, follows Lovelace’s attempts to forge a career for herself as a serious scientist in 1840s London and being continually obstructed by men.

But in an unexpected twist of fate, Lovelace finds herself repeatedly reincarnated and gets the chance to try for fame again, first as Grace Hopper (creator of COBOL) in 1940s America, and then as Steve Jobs in 1980s Silicon Valley. Eventually, confronted with the destruction of all her work by a shady tech billionaire, she realises that it is the very nature of intelligence that she should be fighting for….

(4) APPEAL TO CONSERVE PRATCHETT COVER ARTIST’S WORK. The Guardian tells that “Family of Discworld illustrator seek wealthy patron to conserve legacy of ‘one of the great artists of our time’”.

 Josh Kirby’s art has adorned hundreds of book covers – perhaps most notably dozens of Terry Pratchett novels, especially the bestselling Discworld series.

His body of work is far more wide-ranging, though – Kirby’s paintings have graced the covers of volumes by Ray Bradbury, Ian Fleming, HG Wells, Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville and Neil Gaiman, and he’s done posters for movies including the Star Wars franchise.

Now the family of the artist, who died in 2001, is looking for a philanthropist of the arts to keep the vast collection of original paintings together and make sure Kirby’s original artworks are preserved for posterity in one or more museums or galleries.

(5) MORE ON ROGER PERKINS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The British SF fan recently sadly died.  He was introduced to fandom through the ‘City Illiterates’, the Phil Strick SF class at the Sandford Institute in 1971 before moving to the City of London Institute of Literature (City Lit – hence the  ‘City Illiterates’). His first convention was Chessmancon in 1972 after which he was an Eastercon and Novacon regular.  He then became part of the BECCON (Basildon Essex Centre/Crest CONvention) team that ran series of biennial SE England regional conventions (1981, ’83 and ’85) conventions before running the BECCON ’87 Eastercon (Britain’s national convention) in Birmingham (which saw the launch of SF2 Concatenation as an annual print zine as one of a couple of the convention’s spin-offs).  Roger was BECCON’s treasurer for all four conventions. He went on to be a member of the 1989 Contrivance Eastercon. In their bid to host that year’s Eastercon, they held a fan vote on two sites: one on mainland Britain and one on the Jersey Channel Isles.  The vote for Jersey was decisive but nonetheless caused the usual ire of fandom’s vocal minority who claimed that as the Channel Isles were not part of Britain (it is a UK protectorate), they should not host the British national convention. Nonetheless, that convention was such a success that it prompted others to put on the 1993 joint Eastercon-Eurocon in the same venue a couple of years later.  Roger gafiated shortly after moving from NE London to Wales where he had a boat called Chrestomancy.

BECCON ’81 committee and GoH. From left: Peter Tyers, Simon Beresford, Jonathan Cowie (behind), Mike Westhead, Anthony Heathcote, Bernie Peek, Barrington J. Bayley (GoH), Kathy Westhead, Roger Robinson, John Stewart, Brian Ameringen, Simon Beresford, Charles Goodwin, Roger Perkins.

(6) WHO COMPANION SHOWN THE TARDIS DOOR. Deadline says after her first season “’Doctor Who’ Star Millie Gibson Dropped; Varada Sethu Joins BBC Show”.

Here’s a shocker: the BBC and Bad Wolf have reportedly replaced Millie Gibson as Doctor Who‘s companion after she filmed just one season as Ncuti Gatwa‘s sidekick.

The Daily Mirror’s Nicola Methven, who is well-sourced on Doctor Who, said Gibson would be replaced by Andor star Varada Sethu in Gatwa’s second season as the Time Lord.

The BBC and Bad Wolf did not respond to a request for comment. The story has not been denied and appeared to be confirmed by Gatwa on Instagram (see below)….

…The Mirror said the decision was made by Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies and Gibson will not appear in the 2024 Christmas special after her first full season, which premieres in May.

“Millie Gibson has all but left now and there’s a brand new companion, which is really exciting,” a source told the Mirror. “Russell is keeping things moving and isn’t letting the grass grow, that’s for sure.”

On Sethu, a BBC source added: “Varada is a real gem, Russell was just blown away by her talent. The cast and crew have really warmed to her and he’s sure the fans will too.”…

Here’s the Wikipedia on Varada Sethu.

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Born January 20, 1948 — Nancy Kress, 76. Another one of my favorite writers. Okay, I do like a lot of female writers. I also have a fair number who get chocolate. A coincidence? You decide. 

She has won two Hugos, the first for her “Beggars in Spain” novella — later a novel as well, both are excellent in their own way.  Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine published it first in April 1991 in three parts.  Avon than, after expanded it, adding three additional parts to the novel, published it two years. There followed Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride. They make up the Sleepless series. 

Nancy Kress

She’s a prolific writer. The Probability Universe trilogy, or a trilogy so far, with an Earth wrecked by ecology disaster coupled with a stargate and an alien artifact of possible immense power is fascinating.

The Crossfire twofer reminds a bit of something Anderson might do if he was writing today with a colony finding that it’s sharing a world with an alien race. It’s excellent but then she’s a very, very good writer always.  

Under the pen name Anna Kendell, she wrote a trilogy of present day thrillers in a series called Robert Cavanaugh Genetic. Bit awkward I think but it gets some point across. 

Not to be outdone there, that name went all out fantasy in Soulvine Moor Chronicles Series where a man cross over to the land of the dead. It was set in imagined medieval times.

We’re back to her name and her fascination with genetics, so t Nebula Award-winning novella, the Yesterday’s Kin series, this purely SF looks the limits of human genetics.

Now for her short stories, oh my, I think she wrote, though I can’t count accurate that high, close to a hundred stories. So which collection is the best to get a reason sampling of these stories? That’s easy —the Subterranean Press’ massive 560 page The Best of Nancy Kress. 

(8) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side has a writer in crisis.
  • Tom Gauld has gone revisionist.

(9) £1 MILLION COMICS. “First-edition Superman and Spider-Man comics sell for more than £3million” at Wales Online.

Heritage Auctions in Dallas, US, has sold a number of comics. A Superman> no. 1 went for £2,006,269 (US$2.34 million). The first Amazing Spider-Man from 1963 in mint condition fetched £1,086,990 (US$1.38 m) which is reportedly nearly three times the previous record for that title. Finally, an All-Star Comics no.8, which saw Wonder Woman’s debut, was sold for £1,182.166 (US$1.5m).

(10) MISSED CLOSE ENCOUNTER. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I was disappointed to learn that I missed a close encounter with a UFO in central London this week: I was just several miles away and had I looked over the roof tops I would have seen it in the distance! “Massive Samsung drone show with colourful whirring lights ‘mistaken for UFO’ – and passerbys cry ‘call the Men In Black’” in The Sun.
 
The huge UFO seemed to have made it through the Moonbase interceptor shield, and evaded Sky Diver.  Over 100 feet across (police laser range finders put it at 100 cubits exactly), the UFO shone with many lights, some of which were presumably navigation landing lights.

The craft hovered and rotated for eight minutes before appearing to land on the River Thames.
 
So why did it pick Canary Wharf, London’s second financial centre and overflow from the city’s ‘Square Mile’?  Well, for us Brit Cit locals, who are used to seeing SHADO mobiles rumbling through green belt woodland, the prevailing view is that that location was picked to avoid the said SHADO mobiles as these are too bulky to operate in the city. (Besides, think of the damage a mobile cannon could do to the area’s opulent buildings.)

Of course, it wasn’t long before SHADO released its cover story. The UFO was composed of a hundred drones flying in formation to mark Samsung’s launch of its new AI powered Galaxy S smartphone. Believe that if you must.

The truth is up there.

(11) FOR YOUR BETROTHED. Manly Brands has plans for your wedding ceremony – give your spouse a selection from the “Lord of the Rings™ Ring Collection”. Others not shown include The Gollum and The Ringwraith. Fully endorsed by marriage counselors and divorce attorneys!

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Chris Barkley for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]